Indigenous peoples, whose territories span some of the planet’s most ecologically sensitive regions, are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Indigenous cultures, economies, and wellbeing are often intricately linked to the environment, bearing a disproportionately high burden from the effects of climate change. As the global response to climate risks intensifies—including the rapid rollout of corporate climate disclosure requirements around the world—the legal intersections among climate risks, Indigenous rights, and corporate fiduciary obligations are becoming increasingly intertwined. Climate change is reshaping how we understand legal responsibilities and duties of care, with broad implications for regulatory and governance systems. Recognizing and respecting Indigenous rightsholders and their territories, particularly in the context of climate-related risks and mitigation efforts, are becoming necessary competencies in the proper execution of fiduciary duties of care in this age of the Anthropocene.

Accelerating Risks Amid Climate Emergency

Despite some countries backpedaling on their climate commitments, with the onset of the second Trump Administration in the United States notably rolling back climate protections in 2025, more than 170 countries have introduced national climate-related policies in the wake of a rapid acceleration of extreme weather events. Climate change and environmental issues have taken centre stage in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report year upon year. Areas previously considered insulated from climate change are diminishing, as institutions and organizations encounter escalating demands to mitigate adverse externalities and align with the transition towards a net-zero carbon future.

As governments, regulators, investors, company managers and employees, consumers, and the public demand greater information on these risks, there has been a swift implementation of climate disclosure requirements around the world. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) is the consolidation across a number of foundations—developed in the public interest—to provide a comprehensive, global baseline of high-quality sustainability disclosure standards, with countries also implementing national iterations of the ISSB. Given the reality of climate-related financial risks, disclosures may increasingly become an access to capital issue dictated by the banks. Businesses, whether they like it or not, will have to understand what greenhouse gas emissions mean and upskill to prepare for rapidly evolving risk registers, including how to adapt in this increasingly volatile, changing environment. 

The intersection between climate change-induced human rights impacts and corporate obligations to respect human rights is gaining increasing recognition in scholarly and policy discourse. The negative impacts of climate change to human rights are well-established in the science and literature, while its mark in the legal realm continues to evolve. The scope and pace of climate and human rights litigation is expanding and diversifying in terms of its defendants, substantive legal claims, and jurisdictions, driven by accelerating extreme weather events and mounting demands for accountability. Over 3,097 cases have been filed against governments, companies, and individuals globally, which is a trend reflecting exponential growth in recent years. The international legal landscape is being reshaped, as courts recognize the scientific consensus on climate change and its implications for human rights. Rulings have established precedents affirming that the adverse effects of climate change are reasonably foreseeable and major emitters may bear legal responsibility for inadequate mitigation efforts. 

Seeing Indigenous Rightsholders and their Territories

Indigenous rights across jurisdictions are governed by a complex array of historical treaties, constitutional provisions, modern legislation, and judicial decisions. Far from being a monolith, Indigenous nations have their own unique cultures and traditions, yet also share similarities including their low emission contributions to the climate crisis and particular vulnerabilities to climate change. As climate change intensifies, Indigenous peoples’ rights are disproportionately impacted as they face the loss of land and resources that are crucial to their identity and survival. International instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognize these nations’ rights to maintain their cultural practices, control over ancestral lands, and to have free, prior, and informed consent when decisions are made that affect their communities. Though these systems have continued to fail Indigenous peoples around the world, the legal protection of Indigenous rights is a foundational aspect of international human rights law.

Past legal scholarship has tended to demarcate a public-private law divide, but international legal orders and norms are increasingly being woven into and embedded within private and corporate legal obligations, and increasingly being imparted into local and national jurisdictions, including UNDRIP. For example, in Canada, the provincial government of British Columbia has enacted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), affirming that UNDRIP applies to provincial laws, and that Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment; the productive capacity of, and spiritual relationships with, their lands or territories and resources; and the protection of Indigenous laws according to international human rights standards. The Canadian Sustainability Standards Board, which is the country’s adaption of the ISSB, aims to include issues specific to Canada including how, in particular, “advancing reconciliation with First Nation, Metis, and Inuit Peoples in Canada is fundamental to the work of the Canadian standard-setting for sustainability-related financial disclosures.” 

John Borrows and Shayla Proud in their work, “Teachings of Sustainability, Stewardship, & Responsibility: Indigenous Perspectives on Obligation, Wealth, Trusts, & Fiduciary Duty” explores the legal concept of fiduciary duty through Indigenous legal perspectives across eight diverse nations. Borrows and Proud note how Indigenous fiduciary obligations include duties to the land, water, plants, and living creatures, as well as community members as beneficiaries. Indigenous legal orders offer critical insights for ensuring the effective stewardship of Indigenous peoples’ collective wealth. The disjuncture between Indigenous fiduciary obligations to the environment, and corporate director fiduciary obligations to the best interests of the corporation, demarcate a fundamental clash in legal and ethical paradigms – one that exposes the limitations of settler corporate governance frameworks in recognizing relational responsibilities to the Earth and future generations. As a result of colonial histories, such a notion of including obligations to the land and living creatures seems vastly removed from modern day corporate realities. But in fact, the transformation of laws towards an inflective form of governance cognizant of our more-than-human world, is indeed what is needed under this climate emergency.

Impacts on Fiduciary Duties of Care

Climate risks in relation to human rights are altering our status quo understanding of legal rights and fiduciary obligations in this epoch of human history. Changing risk registers in response to climate change are potentially creating new understandings of evolving duties of care in which business leaders must engage.

The business responsibility to respect human rights is well established in hard and soft laws. Under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, corporations have the responsibility to respect human rights wherever they operate and regardless of their size or industry. This responsibility includes requiring companies to know their actual or potential impacts, prevent and mitigate abuses, and address adverse impacts with which they are involved. 

Corporate law and policy must integrate the realities of corporations’ unsustainable practices and incorporate their responsibility to protect human rights in relation to the impacts of climate change on Indigenous rightsholders. In the context of director fiduciary obligations and climate change, collaborative work from legal experts and the Commonwealth Climate Law Initiative and the Canada Climate Law Initiative have lessened the knowledge gap in understanding the necessity of placing climate change on the board agenda. Directors are at risk of breaching their fiduciary duties if they do not, at minimum, consider the risks put upon the corporation by climate change. Given the growing intersections of climate risks and human rights, including the disproportionate impacts of climate change to Indigenous rightsholders and the international and national legal instruments bolstering such rights, corporations would be well within their fiduciary duties to not only consider such risks, but also how they can proactively mitigate their contributions to such risks. Ignoring human rights and Indigenous rightsholders, particularly the impacts of climate change on Indigenous territories and livelihoods, are antithetical to the goal of attaining a sustainable future for all.  As legal frameworks and risk assessments rapidly evolve in response to extreme weather events and foreseeable disasters, they will contribute to a reframing of fiduciary obligations for corporate and institutional leaders. Businesses are well advised in keeping these shifts in mind amid their modern-day decision-making responsibilities.