Game Changers special: Modern slavery and the case for a just transition to net zero

Elena Lambros
Hello and welcome to ESG Matters at Ashurst Perkins Coie.

I'm Elena Lambros, Risk Advisory Partner, and today you're listening to a special edition of Game Changers. We're bringing together a global Ashurst Perkins Coie team to discuss the human dimensions of net zero, and to examine how climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable communities. We'll cover how the just transition principles, addressing modern slavery, exploitation, food security, and equitable adaptation must be central to climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Joining me here in Brisbane, Australia – from London and Paris – are sustainability and climate law specialist Becky Clissmann, senior social impacts manager Helena Yeaman, and environmental, climate, and energy law specialist Gaëlle Cognet.

So today we're talking about the human dimensions of net zero. Let's jump into the discussion.

Elena Lambros
As our tagline says, "Innovation is our tradition”. Helena, what has been our tradition of combating modern slavery, and what work does our firm do today to uphold those values?

Helena Yeaman
We celebrated 200 years of legacy Ashurst in 2022, and our pro bono and social impact teams joined forces to work on a way to honour our founder William Ashurst and his four amazing daughters, as they were all passionate advocates for social justice, particularly women's equality and the abolition of slavery.

So we wanted to continue their legacy, and we set up the Modern Slavery Action Plan, which sets out our ongoing commitment to the abolition of modern slavery.

In practice, what that looks like from my side: I work with NGOs in the modern slavery space to find ways in which we can support them. For example, offering volunteers from our firm to give their time and skills in practical ways to survivors of modern slavery. One program I run, for example, is a series of digital literacy workshops, where volunteers join each week to support participants in how to stay safe online, navigate safely, and build/navigate AI safely and build their digital skills. And at the end of that six-week course, we give the participants a repurposed laptop to take away with them.
We also run art workshops, mentoring programs, and English language support to survivors across the globe. Our pro bono practice utilises our commercial expertise and legal skills to support organisations active in this space, such as advice on governance and operational queries, and research on human trafficking issues. Recently, we've collaborated with three other law firms to provide digital pro bono assistance to create a legal tech tool that will assist modern slavery survivors for a project coordinated by charity partner Hestia.

Elena Lambros
Great, thank you. And I always love hearing the story about where it started from and what we continue to do to this day. It's such a fabulous thing to hear about.

When I think about the work that you're doing in the pro bono practice, and then the work that we also do in our day-to-day ongoing work, Becky, it might be useful for you to kind of draw out for everybody what is that link between exploitation and climate change.

Becky Clissmann
Thanks, Elena. So yeah, there is definitely a link. I mean, of course, it sort of comes on two levels, really.

Firstly, the exploitation of nature and labour over the centuries are some of the driving forces behind climate change. You know, as we're experiencing it, but also more importantly, perhaps climate change is a multiplier. So, in relation to the vulnerable, it makes them more vulnerable, and the destabilising effect of both sudden onset climate events (such as storms or glaciers collapsing or anything like that), as well as the slow onset climate change (which is things like warming, heating over time and areas becoming uninhabitable), that leads to things like ruined harvests, which then leads to people having to migrate. You can also bring in things like epidemics.

Obviously, when people are in camps, and all of that can result in increasing violence [which] drives migration, tears apart communities, and generally, it's this multiplying effect of all the difficult situations that people find themselves in get that much worse.

And for those who were forced to migrate, often at short notice with little or no resources, the risks of exploitation and abuse just increase because their choices have been reduced. So you need resources to adapt, which is obviously one of our key focuses with climate as well as mitigation.

And those resources are if you don't have those resources, you're at greatly increased risk. So for human societies to successfully transition, as we all are aiming for, to that climate and nature resilient economy we want [then] we also really have to think about human rights and ensure that there is a just transition. It's not just a transition. It needs to be a just transition.
And this has to start by making the voices of the vulnerable heard and taken into account when we're doing things like our transition plans and wider government adaptation.

Elena Lambros
Yeah, thanks, Becky. And it is really an important link to draw out because we start talking about vulnerable people and pro bono practice, and then the impact that climate change has on that. Gaëlle, I think you've got a really interesting perspective, particularly on adaptation. Can you share some of those thoughts with us?

Gaëlle Cognet
Yes, thank you, Elena. Yes, I would completely concur with what just Becky said.

The most vulnerable communities and regions are those that are suffering and will suffer the most from the consequences of climate change. And climate change intensifies injustice. Populations who contribute the least to it suffer the most from its impacts.

So this can be seen at the international level, where small island developing states are at risk of disappearing, but also at the national level within resourced communities. What we must bear in mind is that even more so than mitigation, which means reducing greenhouse gas emissions, adapting to climate change raises many issues, and it's highly challenging. It questions climate modeling, data methodology, financing, how you generate value from resilience, unavoided cost, and insurability.

So this calls into question a number of the foundations of organisations and their own mental softwares. So even within developed countries, we already observe that climate change is calling into question the habitability of certain territories, both from a scientific and an insurability standpoint.

It raises fundamental questions about the extent to which we can factor in uncertainty, the extent to which we can adapt, and the point at which we may have to accept retreat – a prospect that can be experienced as deeply dramatic and profoundly unfair by the communities concerned.

On the front line, this concerns coastal areas and mountainous regions, but also more and more areas are exposed to the swelling and shrinkage of clay – it's a big issue in France – to repeated flooding and to temperatures that will become increasingly unbearable in summer.

We have seen in France, we have experienced climate migration this June during the big heat wave, and the luckiest among us left the cities when the most disadvantaged population couldn't leave and couldn't afford to install air conditioning.

You will find a recent paper by the European Central Bank on the Paris Agreement 10 years later, and it says climate change is not only an environmental crisis, but a profound human rights crisis that is already eroding basic rights, especially for the most vulnerable.

And current political and legal systems are failing to protect people adequately. I find it stunning that it's not an NGO telling [us] that, but a very essential financial institution.

So yes, the impacts of climate change are direct – straight to the exercise of human rights, access to education when schools closed, access to health when you live in a furnace for nights and days, and when hospitals don't have air conditioning.

So a central challenge for us finance lawyers is to help develop new financing tools in order to mobilise the public and private funds needed to support these transformations as equitably as possible.

Elena Lambros
I love the last point that you made about what, as a lawyer, you can do from a financing perspective in making it equitable. Are there some examples that you can provide around how these ‘just transition considerations’ arise in your practice? And how you can factor them in?

Gaëlle Cognet
Yes, defending and implementing a just transition is a core aspect of our work in Africa across both sovereign and project finance. Following COP30, we published an article on the subject. It's titled COP 30: A further step towards a just transition in Africa, and you will find the link at the web on the page of the of the podcast.

Because in Africa, the cost associated with the various adverse effects of climate change are significantly higher than in other regions of the world. Seven of the 10 countries identified as most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are in Africa, when Africa produces only about 3% – 4% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions.

So our teams are very committed to this cause, and they are delighted to help fund projects aimed at implementing the sustainable development goals on healthcare, electrification, transportation. So, in among COP 30 achievements was the decision to develop a just transition mechanism, which acknowledged the need to support the just transition in a manner that does not exacerbate the debt burden of countries, and it also formally opened a long-awaited two-year process on recognising Africa's special needs and circumstances.

This is a first step in response to Africa's longstanding demand for this formal recognition, which would acknowledge its unique vulnerabilities, including low historical emissions, disproportionate climate impacts, and limited adaptive capacity.

What we are particularly passionate about, as I mentioned earlier, in supporting the development of certain financial innovations, like pause clauses in financing instruments for the most vulnerable territories; it's quite technical. So they are also referred to as climate resilient debt clauses (CRDCs) or natural disaster clauses (NATCs) because in addition to their exposure to increasingly severe extreme weather events, these countries are often heavily in debt, which limits their ability to raise the funds needed to cope with such events and rebuild, and they are at risk of default.
So these clauses allow a temporary suspension of debt service upon the occurrence of a triggering event – [that could] be a pandemic or natural disaster – enabling the affected country to redirect these resources towards recovery. It has evolved from earlier innovations such as the hurricane clauses introduced in 2018 for Caribbean countries, and the debt service suspension initiative, which was implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the question we are facing now in our own work is how to facilitate the large-scale implementation of these suspension clauses, so they are accepted by commercial banks. A degree of standardisation is required to ensure that all creditors are treated fairly, because you don't want to agree to a payment deferral only to realise that this relief measure is allowing your debtor to pay your competitors.
So, an international working group on this topic (called the London Coalition on Sustainable Sovereign Debt) proposes to include the trigger synchronisation requirement. Another question is how to introduce this clause in existing debt, where you have all international banks involved and Chinese banks also involved. So you have to get some kind of international agreement for that. We also published an article on this topic: the rise of the pause clause and financing resilience, which you will find the link to on this podcast page.

Elena Lambros
Thank you. So definitely some complex clauses and discussions to have when you're considering all of those international jurisdictions working towards it. But good that there is actually those things being developed and working in place.

Now, Becky, in 2025 some climate victims, supported by environmental NGOs, brought a legal action against the French government, and the argument that resources allocated to adaptation are insufficient. What does this mean if you're developing a transition plan, or what additional risks is this introducing?

Becky Clissmann
Thanks, Elena. So there's obviously – with transition plans – what you're looking for if you've got a credible transition plan, which is something that we've looked into in the past. – and there's a link to an article that we published earlier this year on the podcast website. But what you're looking at is to weave the whole of just transition principles through a transition plan, so it shouldn't just be a sort of a siloed issue.

And very often, you sometimes see a paragraph saying, "just transition” and there's sort of a paragraph. But we think it really needs to go through the entire plan. So obviously there are lots of elements of the plan, and we don't have time today to go through all of them. But I was just going to highlight a few where I thought it was particularly key.

So, starting off as always with the kind of strategic ambition of the plan, we think the transition plan should include customers, communities that businesses operate within, as well as the wider society as the stakeholders that are referenced in the plan. So that allows the company to assess the impacts and dependencies on those wider stakeholders, not just employees.

And very often, you hear about – and quite understandably and rightly – you do hear about employees and what the transition plan might mean for them. But you need to go beyond that. It can't just be that group of people because they exist within communities and societies, and changes that are made to them obviously have a ripple effect.

So your long-term net zero goal should ideally reference a just transition principle. So you should be looking to transition to net zero in a way that is equitable and fair and considers the interests and needs of those wider groups and human rights and labour standards.

And then the second example of where I think just transition principles need to weave into a transition plan comes in the policies and conditions that you need to reference. So these are the policies and conditions that are relevant to the transition plan, and the TPT, the transition plan task force, disclosure framework talks about – you can include human rights and labour standards in those policies and conditions when you're describing them. But you want to have, for example, if the company has a commitment to pay a real living wage, or they have commitments to collective bargaining principles, or they have policies around how they will consult with the communities that they might be involved in, then all of those things should be referenced in the transition plan, so that it's clear that it's looking at a wider group, not just focusing on employees as stakeholders, although of course they are an important group as well.

And then I think the other thing, the third thing that I wanted to bring to people's minds was financing –obviously a key part of transitions. And when we talked about credible transition plans earlier this year, financing and getting the data on that right in the transition plan. That's a key point.

But the there's a coalition called the Financing a Just Transition Alliance. And they recommend that the transition plan considers the operational expenditure and also capital expenditure that's necessary to deliver just transition goals that result from things like changes to workforce, the skills and training that might need to happen, the supply chain development that might need to happen, and all the community benefits that the transition plan might need to develop. So there needs to be a financing around that, and that needs to be transparent within the plan. So that's one thing, and then that group has also suggested a number of metrics for inclusion in the metrics and targets section of the plan, and that is particularly key because where there are metrics, that does drive the behaviour going forward because you've obviously got to report on your metrics.

Becky Clissmann
So then that will mean that it's not just a sort of a label, but actually there are actions around that that then get reported with subsequent iterations of the transition plan, but also perhaps in the annual reporting cycle.

And then, lastly, and probably most obviously, the engagement section. You know, as well as consulting with employees, you need to think about consultations with wider community and society. Those voices need to somehow come through in the transition plan, and they need to be based on engagement with those groups.

So you need to not only have that engagement happening, but – perhaps referencing again the metrics and targets section – [it’d] be really nice to have a metric that looked at the number of dialogues that you'd had with communities, because I think that's very telling. There's only one or two, perhaps. It's not the kind of full dialogue that you would like to see. So things like that are really, really helpful.
And if you weave all of those issues through a transition plan, somebody reading it will then come away very much with the idea that [your organisation] have a clear view on what you're doing to achieve a just transition, as opposed to just transitioning.

Elena Lambros
Thanks, Becky. So really important, obviously, to be very clear and thoughtful in the way that you approach a transition plan. And then we heard from Gaëlle around thinking through all the adaptation that needs to occur and how that has been financed.

Now, Helena, if I turn back to you and what's really important to me when I think about Ashurst Perkins Coie itself and our firm's procurement guidance, what do we do in this space? (You know, particularly noting the amount of coffee that I might drink when I'm in my job occasionally!) It'd be great to hear about what Ashurst Perkins Coie is doing.

Helena Yeaman
Yeah, well, we have done some considerable work around our coffee and chocolate procurement, which does rather show where our priorities lie! I think those projects. They were a valuable lesson for us to learn how to do a really deep dive into complex supply chains and what we need to look out for. But day-by-day in practice, we provide a digital tool for any spend request that comes from the business, which triages all purchases across a single entry point, and that directs high-value, high-risk spend, such as modern slavery considerations, to a system that delivers a risk module and due diligence questionnaires for our critical suppliers to complete.

We also have science-based targets (SBTs), and that's for our supply chain engagement, which states that 85% of our suppliers by emissions will have to set their SBTs by 2029. It's a lever for us to engage our suppliers, and whilst primarily emissions focused, it opens up an avenue to discuss key areas of concern for us in ESG, including modern slavery.

As well as this, our procurement team have just created a bespoke training module, in collaboration with Action Sustainability, to train our global team and any other key partners across the business to further understand and manage our own modern slavery risks in the supply chains we work with.

Elena Lambros
Great, thank you. So taking it back to where we started, and thinking about William Ashurst and his four daughters can you – Helena and Becky – give me one key takeaway that you'd like our listeners to take with them?

Helena Yeaman
It's critical we don't leave individuals and communities behind. A transition that works for a minority elite is not sustainable. And from our work, we see significant interest from clients in a just transition, and even in well-resourced communities. The challenges of adaptation are real.

Becky Clissmann
Thanks, and I think picking up on that – in not leaving people behind, it's really important in all of our work that we join up the dots, and we don't just focus on environmental sustainability, but we also focus on human rights needs and the kind of work that can be done by people like Gaëlle in the financing world and others. You know, that's the kind of dot joining that really needs to be seen at scale to achieve a just transition.

Elena Lambros
Thank you for listening to this episode of ESG Matters at Ashurst Perkins Coie. I hope you found this episode insightful.

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