What does the risk landscape look like today?
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THE RISE OF ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS
All these developments signal growing ambition and creative thinking on the part of claimants, and there is plenty of scope for these nascent trends to develop in the decade ahead. However, Neil Beresford, an insurance partner at Clyde & Co, makes the point that the litigation landscape is evolving fast, and technological developments are also likely to drive changes to duties of care. The liability risk associated with old technologies increases significantly as technology improves. The less reliant the world becomes on fossil fuels, the more emboldened will be the judiciary to scrutinise historic technologies and behaviours, and the more likely it becomes that companies will be held accountable for the ‘sins of the past’. - Neil Beresford, Partner, Clyde & Co, London
Claimants are also relying on established legal principles to achieve their goals. In 2019 ClientEarth successfully used company law to overturn a decision by the board of utility Enea to approve construction of a new coal-fired power station in Poland: the Polish Court ruled that the board had failed to follow the correct procedures (the project has since been abandoned) 48 . Procedural flaws were also the focus of recent moves to block the British government’s approval of a third runway at Heathrow. Construction is now set to go ahead, after the UK Supreme Court last year overturned an earlier ruling which had blocked it on the grounds that ministers had failed to take the UK’s carbon reduction commitments into consideration 49 . Drax recently abandoned its plan to build Europe’s largest gas power plant at its site in North Yorkshire in the UK shortly after a legal challenge against government approval was rejected by the Court of Appeal 50 .
48 Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/e43d96a6-b44c-11e9-bec9-fdcab53d6959 49 [2020] UKSC 52 https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2020-0042-judgment.pdf 50 BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-56200100
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