Meena Kamath, The Chancery Lane Project: “I wanted to use the power of the law to fight climate change.”

The IKEA Foundation helps many organisations accelerate their efforts in combating climate change. Facts and figures speak for themselves, but who exactly are the people behind this extraordinary work? In this storytelling series, we spotlight brave individuals who move mountains in their climate action strategies and solutions. Today: Meena Kamath, The Chancery Lane Project.

From a young age, I’ve always been really interested in and passionate about the climate and the world around us. But I didn’t actually set out to have a career in it. I graduated just before the great financial crash back in 2008, so I fell into a career in a big corporate law firm and thankfully found my way to being a real estate lawyer.

The built environment is also something I’ve always found fascinating. You can see how the physical things we’ve built around us impact our lives day to day. And similarly, how the built environment shapes the world around it in both positive and challenging ways.

As I progressed as a lawyer, I started to understand the built environment sector more deeply; its power dynamics, its capacity to create social value and its ability to influence people and politics. I started thinking about how we as a sector could make a more positive impact on the planet.

Practical solutions

Within the sector, there was a lot of energy in the conversations about change. What I felt was lacking was the ability to identify practical solutions for how to make that change happen.

Then, four years ago, just a few weeks before the first UK pandemic lockdown in 2020, I had my daughter. Becoming a parent collided with my increasing knowledge of how we operate as a sector, and an increasing desire to use my skills to do more for the future. I began to realise I had to be brave and understand the value and superpowers I have as a lawyer.

I wanted to make the switch from corporate law and dedicate my career to using the power of the law to fight climate change. I felt drawn to The Chancery Lane Project because it offers a credible, practical solution, using this humble tool to help decarbonise the way we do business.

Making climate clauses accessible

Contracts offer a powerful solution because they govern the vast majority of the sophisticated global economy. In the built environment, contracts can last for decades. Every contract we work on includes obligations on both parties to consider climate and how they will reduce their emissions.

We have more than 170 legal clauses relating to climate on our website. They’re intended for lawyers to use – but I’m proud of how the team have worked to make them more accessible. They’ve created “how-to guides” to help business leaders understand the barriers lawyers face when trying to embed these clauses in contracts. They help us reach decision makers who don’t come from a legal background.

For example, imagine you’re a landlord who owns a portfolio of large shopping centres, and you want to have climate clauses in all your leases. You need to introduce that idea sensitively to your tenants. One of our guides explains how to do that.

We also have a guide on how to factor climate conscious decision-making into board meetings, and how to enforce climate clauses once they’re in your contracts. It’s early days but the initial feedback on the guides from the non-lawyer community is really positive.

Getting the stars to align

One of the most challenging conversations I have is with people within the sector who do believe that businesses need to take meaningful action now. But they’re often met with resistance.

This could be short-term attitudes around the upfront costs involved in implementing some of our clauses. There’s a tendency to think, “I’m going to shift that to next year, to the next budget.” Getting all the stars to align in a way that enables the business to implement the clauses can be difficult.

We understand that companies need to maximise profit for their investors. That can create difficulties for those who want to create change. But we aren’t just talking about “doing the right thing”. From a business perspective, addressing climate risk through your contracts is also a matter of preserving long-term asset values.

By including these obligations in their contracts, businesses can start to meet their climate pledges. They can get on the front foot. It’s a more attractive thing for a business to address legal risks of climate in an intricate way that works for them, rather than to wait for the legislation hit them over the head.

Business holds the key

If I had two minutes to speak at COP 29, I’d say to the business leaders in the room: you hold the key to unlocking our ability to drive deep systemic-level change. You need to factor climate into every decision you make, into every deal you transact, into every working practice you have.

You must stand up and challenge the status quo. You must be brave enough to do something differently. If this isn’t something you know about, you must be humble enough to learn. Most importantly, we must all work together as part of this global community, so we can rewire and build a better economy.

Climate is everyone’s job

My hope is that if we collaborate and listen to each other, we can understand that we’re all affected by climate change. We’re affected in different ways, but we’re all affected. My hope for the future is that we can all see and understand climate is part of our everyday. It’s part of everyone’s job. Even though I left my job in a corporate law firm to work in climate, you don’t have to do that: every single lawyer has the skills and superpowers to fight climate change in their day-to-day work by using these sorts of clauses and helping clients to collaborate for climate.

If everyone does that, we can bring together people from all different parts of society to fight for and improve our future.

About

Meena Kamath is Head of Built Environment at The Chancery Lane Project. The organisation has created more than 170 climate-related clauses that lawyers can write into contracts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It works across high emitting sectors like the built environment, finance and capital markets, food systems and agriculture.

The IKEA Foundation is supporting The Chancery Lane Project to enable systemic climate action in companies, through the use of contracts. We are supporting The Chancery Lane Project because we believe that contracts are an effective and underused lever to deliver fast and fair decarbonisation.