[Param Pandya is the Quadrature Climate Foundation Fellow in Climate Change and Corporate Law at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Environmental Law, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore]
Climate change is no longer a peripheral concern for corporate law — it sits at the centre of how companies are governed, financed, and held accountable. In India, this shift is visible in SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework, the evolving understanding of directors’ duties, and the rising expectations of institutionalinvestors around ESG disclosures. Against this backdrop, the IndiaCorpLaw Blog is running a symposium, Corporate Law and Climate Change: Indian and Comparative Perspectives, bringing together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to examine how Indian corporate law is responding, and must further evolve, to the climate crisis.
The symposium unfolds over four weeks, from 15 August to 11 September 2026, and is organised around four themes: corporate climate litigation; international law and climate change; securities law and climate change; and banking law and climate change. This post previews the eleven contributions that make up the symposium, based on their titles and thematic placement.
This post aims to frame the overarching discourse — situating Indian corporate law’s engagement with climate change within the broader Indian and comparative landscape that the subsequent posts will explore in depth.
Theme 1: Corporate Climate Litigation
The first thematic cluster turns to litigation as a site of corporate climate accountability. Umakanth Varottil‘s post, Corporate Climate Litigation in India: Traversing the Private-Public Law Divide, discusses how climate-related claims against corporations in India straddle the boundary between private law (such as company and tort law) and public law (such as constitutional and environmental regulation). He argues that Indian climate litigation cannot be neatly slotted into either domain alone and that India’s corporate climate litigation is likely to develop primarily through public law, with private law principles serving as a supporting framework rather than through conventional standalone private law claims.
This is followed by a comparative contribution from Akshaya Kamalnath and Kate Ogg, Climate Change Litigation Against Corporations in the Australian Context — Social, Political, and Economic Factors. This blog post looks beyond India to Australia, examining the social, political, and economic conditions that have shaped the trajectory of corporate climate litigation. As the authors highlight, the development of climate change litigation, particularly by unconventional litigants in the context of corporate cases, is not difficult to envisage in the Indian context. Such litigation may be facilitated due to certain public law remedies such as public interest litigation, and in light of India’s long tradition of environmental litigation against the government.
Theme 2: International Law and Climate Change
The second theme examines how international climate commitments filter down into domestic corporate conduct. Raushan Tara Jaswal‘s post, From Paris to the Boardroom: Can Voluntary Corporate Climate Governance Deliver India’s NDCs?, interrogates whether voluntary, board-level climate governance is a credible vehicle for meeting India’s Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement. She argues for greater synergy between voluntary initiatives that operate alongside effective regulatory intervention.
Arjuna Dibley‘s contribution, International Climate Obligations and India’s Public Sector Undertakings, shifts the focus to the state as corporate actor, considering how India’s international climate obligations bear upon the conduct and governance of its public sector undertakings — a category of company that occupies a distinctive space between state responsibility and corporate law.
Rounding off this theme, Hemavathi S. Shekhar and Gunjan Soni examine Domesticating India’s International Climate Law Obligation to Regulate the Conduct of its Private Actors through the Indian Companies Act, 2013. This post traces India’s international climate law obligations and the manner in which they might be translated domestically into binding duties on companies by reforming the existing architecture of the Companies Act, 2013.
Theme 3: Securities Law and Climate Change
The third and largest cluster addresses the securities law dimension of corporate climate governance. Akshaya Kamalnath‘s blog post titled Sustainable Investment Management as a Route to Addressing Climate Change Issues Within Corporate Law — An Indian Perspective considers how the practices and duties of institutional and sustainable investment managers can be leveraged as a mechanism for embedding climate considerations within Indian corporate law.
Anik Bhaduri and Rudresh Mandal, through their post titled Climate Change Stewardship in Indian Controlled Companies: Promises and Perils, engage with the promise and the pitfalls of climate stewardship in companies with controlling shareholders, a structure that characterises much of corporate India and raises distinct governance questions compared to widely-held companies. They argue for legal reform that requires controlling shareholders to disclose reasons for rejecting climate change risk proposals supported by a majority of minority shareholders. Such a requirement would strengthen shareholder stewardship and activism by promoting accountability and dialogue, while avoiding undue short-term activist pressures on controlling shareholders.
Ashwin Murthy then turns to SEBI’s Regulation of the Carbon Market, examining the regulator’s approach to overseeing India’s emerging carbon market — a subject of growing importance as carbon trading develops as a policy tool for emissions reduction.
Closing this theme, Nawneet Vibhaw and Shubham Joshi ask, in Relaxed Environmental Norms, Greater Corporate Responsibility?, whether the relaxation of environmental regulatory norms in relation to maintaining green cover around industrial areas, correspondingly heightens — or perhaps undermines — the responsibility expected of corporations. They argue that when regulatory environmental norms are relaxed, corporates should consciously consider undertaking measures such as developing additional green cover beyond the prescribed regulatory floor.
Theme 4: Banking Law and Climate Change
The final theme brings banking regulation into the climate conversation. Sugandha Yadav‘s post, Banking in the Grey: Inadequate Climate Disclosures by Banks and Missing Regulations in India, points to gaps in climate-related disclosure by Indian banks and the absence of a robust regulatory framework to address them — framing banks as an under-scrutinised node in the climate accountability chain.
The symposium closes with Richa Roy, Shreya Garg, and Akanksha Oak‘s post, Banking on Green: How India’s Regulator Is Building a Climate Finance Architecture. Given that climate vulnerability could adversely impact the Indian financial system, the authors argue in favour of incorporating climate risk and disclosure into prudential regulation – or indeed disclosure of such risks similar to the framework adopted by certain leading global banking regulators.
Looking Ahead
Taken together, these eleven posts trace a wide arc — from the litigation strategies being tested in Indian and comparative courts, through the translation of international climate commitments into domestic corporate obligations, to the securities and banking regulatory architecture that increasingly shapes how Indian companies account for, disclose, and respond to climate risk. The symposium does not treat these as isolated silos: litigation, international law, company law and securities regulation, and banking law each pull on the same underlying question — whether India’s corporate law framework treats climate risk as a central legal concern, or continues to relegate it to the margins of reputation and voluntary practice.
Readers can expect a new post roughly every two to three days over the four-week run. On behalf of the editors of the IndiaCorpLaw Blog, we hope that this symposium generates a rigorous and accessible body of scholarship capable of informing legislative reform, regulatory policy, and corporate practice in India, while situating Indian perspectives within the wider global conversation on sustainable corporate law.
Today, as India marks its 80th year of independence, balancing economic development and sustainability including climate risks, is its modern-day ‘tryst with destiny’. We truly hope that the legal scholarship on corporate law and climate change serves as a small but meaningful contribution towards realising this end.
– Param Pandya