Small Drops in the Ocean, Big Leaps for Environmental Law

By Ho Rey-En

I. Introduction

1      It is all too easy to be cynical about the world today. As our planet's destruction heads towards a point of no return, it becomes questionable whether environmental law has ever been taken seriously. Eleven years ago, most of the world signed the Paris Agreement, committing to limiting the global temperature increase caused by the greenhouse effect to 1.5°C by 2030. Despite the precautionary tales of irreversible damage, the world is on track to overshoot this target.^[1] In the words of atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): "Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead."^[2] The conversation on environmental law, amongst lawyers, academics, scientists and activists, is one of strained hope. Environmental law is criticised as all bark and no bite and rife with empty promises, as governments remain apathetic in the face of a climate doomed for irreversible change. At some point, believing in environmental law becomes difficult. It feels naïve to place faith in legal instruments, statutes and treaties when the world has burned even more fiercely since environmentalism came about in the 1960s, even in an age where scientific developments equip humanity with means never before possessed. The facts speak for themselves: our carbon sinks have weakened as trees have fallen to heat and drought;^[3] the melting Arctic threatens to unlock huge volumes of methane, and unprecedented ocean warming has triggered marine heatwaves that are permanently reshaping nature as we have known it^[4].

2      So the question follows: is environmental law even effective? Logically, a system of law is only effective if it achieves the outcome intended at its inception. Tort law is effective if it duly compensates a person wrongfully injured by another's conduct. Criminal law is effective if certain wrongful behaviour is prevented and punished. Contract law is effective if it gives parties the certainty to contract freely. By this metric, environmental law is effective only if it promotes environmental protection — and if that is the yardstick, environmental law looks close to a failure. But if that is so, why do we keep fighting? Why do environmental lawyers continue to be employed, and why do activists keep petitioning courts to do more? This is the question I have been asking since I first began studying environmental law.

II.            What, then, is the role of environmental law?

3      It follows from the definition above that the role of environmental law is to protect the environment. Environmental law consists of, at the international level, multilateral agreements and frameworks that states sign onto, and, at the domestic level, statutes that implement these agreements. Beyond this, environmental objectives are pursued obliquely through other areas of law, some examples include through: tort claims for environmental damage, disclosure obligations in securities law, and green finance requirements in banking regulation.

III. The impossible task of confining "environmental law" to a definition

4      The intuitive, oft-quoted definition of environmental law is simple: it is the body of law that seeks to protect the natural environment. Simple as this sounds, it is quietly radical. Protecting the environment rather than an identifiable human victim implies that the environment has intrinsic value worth protecting for its own sake — independent of its value to human beings. This sits uneasily against the traditional conception of law, which exists fundamentally to prevent harm to persons and to safeguard human rights and property, and which has shaped its rules around treating the environment as a resource for human benefit rather than a rights-bearing entity in itself.

5      This anthropocentric tendency explains why environmental law, despite being a body of law, lacks the standing of its counterparts and is frequently criticised as toothless. In recent years, however, Rhiti argues that a philosophical shift toward post-humanist thought has taken hold, in which ecological systems are increasingly recognised as legal subjects — the law assigning rights and protections through human proxies so that the environment's interests are formally weighed in legal decision-making.^[5] Rhiti frames this recognition as a paradigm shift in legal thinking, one that challenges the long-standing anthropocentric foundations of legal systems and encourages frameworks that better appreciate the interdependence of ecological and human systems.^[6]

6      Locally, Chng observes that Singapore's courts have been reluctant to take a more substantive role in adjudicating environmental governance, hemmed in by the limited avenues for environmental litigation within the common law framework and by the judiciary's own caution about overstepping its institutional role in checking the other branches of government.^[7] Beyond statute and regulation, Chng suggests that environmental law can instead be conceptualised as a means of furthering the rule of law and rational decision-making generally.^[8] Framing environmental law this way distances it from judicial activism by making it more palatable to a common law judiciary wary of intruding beyond its remit, and thereby allowing Singapore's common law to evolve, however incrementally, in a direction more responsive to environmental concerns.

7      Reading Rhiti and Chng together, the question I want to press is whether either development is enough to be called effective — whether these shifts can withstand the empirical evidence of the planet's rapid deterioration. I agree with Rhiti that decentring the human perspective in legal theory is a welcome change, but I question whether a shift on the normative level alone is fast enough to produce real, quantitative change. On Chng's account, framing environmental law as a vehicle for rational decision-making may persuade judges to weigh environmental impact as part of adjudication — but one could equally argue that this dilutes environmental law's force by reducing it to a mere factor for consideration, rather than treating it as the urgent concern that the state of climate change, and Singapore's particular vulnerability to it, demands.

8      I want to test this tension against recent developments: court decisions signalling a possible trend toward frameworks of accountability for environmental harm, the rise of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, and domestic and international efforts to codify climate obligations. In so arguing, I question the role that environmental law plays, and propose that environmental law has progressed as a series of subtle paradigm shifts but question whether these small wins are enough to consider it effective in beating the rapidly approaching tide of irreversible climate change.

IV. A paradigm of "small wins"

(a)  Climate litigation

9      Although the US Courts’ posture also signal a reluctance to impose climate liability on large emitters, the Center for International Environmental Law maintains that climate litigation will not stop.^[9] Instead, plaintiffs have sued smarter, by redirecting their claims toward the financial arm of the fossil fuel economy, which include banks, insurers and institutional investors, for breach of fiduciary duty.^[10] Where traditional tort claims sought to prove that an emitting entity caused a share of global emissions, fiduciary duty claims ask a narrower and, arguably, more tractable question: whether financial entities have adequately assessed and managed foreseeable climate-related financial risk. The Center points to Kvek v Cushman & Wakefield, where plaintiffs in the US District Court argued in March 2026 that Cushman, one of the world's most prominent real estate companies, had breached its fiduciary duties by failing to protect its employees' retirement savings from climate-related risk.^[11] This followed a 2025 Canadian decision considering whether pension plan managers had failed to balance the interests of present and future beneficiaries by neglecting climate risk.^[12]

10   This is a genuinely promising development, but it is not prominent across all territories. Lim and Varottil's work on corporate and securities law enforcement in Hong Kong, Singapore and India, found little incentive to invoke private enforcement mechanisms, such as shareholder derivative actions for breach of directors' duties, in the climate risk context.^[13] Doctrinal uncertainty around oppression and unfair prejudice actions creates further hurdles, making private litigation a suboptimal tool for addressing climate risk in these jurisdictions.^[14] Lim and Varottil attribute this partly to the absence of the economic incentives, such as class actions, contingency fees, and activist shareholder cultures that sustain a strong private enforcement ecosystem elsewhere.^[15] This mirrors Chng's observation on public litigation: Asian judiciaries, wary of overstepping their institutional role, are similarly unreceptive to climate-driven litigation.

11   Beyond private law, a rising trend sees NGOs and states bringing suit against corporate emitters directly, with courts fashioning new bases for responsibility. In June 2026, the City of Paris secured a partial victory against TotalEnergies, with a Paris court holding that the company must disclose the climate risks tied to its oil and gas products and set out plans to address them, as required under France's duty of vigilance law.^[16] Hailed as a landmark in French climate law, it was nonetheless only a partial victory: the court stopped short of ordering specific measures, such as limiting overseas exploration and production or imposing binding emissions targets, which means that reduction remains a matter for TotalEnergies' own discretion, not judicial command.^[17]

12   This caution is not unique to Paris. In one of the most closely watched climate cases of the decade, the Hague Court of Appeal in November 2024 overturned the celebrated 2021 Milieudefensie v Shell ruling, which had ordered Shell to cut its global CO2 emissions by 45% (relative to 2019 levels) by 2030.^[18] The Court of Appeal upheld the principle that Shell, and, by extension, other large emitters, owes a duty of care to help combat dangerous climate change.^[19] However, it refused to bind Shell to any specific percentage reduction target, holding that courts are not the appropriate forum to set the granular contours of corporate climate policy; that task belongs to legislators and regulators operating across sectors and jurisdictions.^[20] As commentary on the case has since observed, a more durable strategy may lie less in litigating individual companies into compliance and more in pursuing governments that fail to implement policy consistent with internationally agreed targets, since only systemic, cross-sectoral regulation can deliver the scale of reduction the science demands.^[21]

13   Data bears out the broader trend: of apex-court climate decisions handed down by the end of 2024, 44% of project-specific cases were decided in favour of climate action, and litigation is increasingly reaching the highest courts in the world.^[22] What is most notable is not simply the growth in case numbers but the sophistication of the claims, the widening range of defendants being targeted, and the growing legal and political complexity businesses must now navigate.^[23]

14   Taken together, this is a genuinely good development as litigation is slowly reshaping how companies think about climate risk, embedding it as a live legal exposure rather than a reputational afterthought. However, it is a slow mechanism: time-consuming, resource-intensive, and dependent on the happenstance of which plaintiffs are willing to sue and which courts are willing to hear them. Its reach into Asia remains thinner still, though the fact that many of these conglomerates operate through regional subsidiaries suggests some spillover effect may yet follow. And even where litigation succeeds, the harder work of enforcement and monitoring compliance is often where the real gains are won or lost.

(b)  The development of ESG

15   Corporate sustainability has undergone its own paradigm shift. Where pursuing environmental protection was once viewed as a zero-sum game where more environmentally-friendly practices meant less cutting corners for profit, the rise of ESG investing has embedded environmental performance into the calculus of financial risk itself. Now, consumers, insurers and, above all, investors, treat a company's management of climate exposure as material to its value. This shift tracks a broader move in corporate theory away from shareholder primacy and toward stakeholder theory: the idea that a business exists to create value for all parties affected by its operations, not shareholders alone.^[24] Though stakeholder theory remains anthropocentric in its origins, it sits comfortably with the idea that the environment, too, is a stakeholder whose interests deserve to be priced in.

16   The clearest illustration of this shift is in top-down regulatory measures that aimed at ensuring transparency in corporations’ ESG efforts. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires large companies operating in the bloc to disclose detailed, audited data on climate risk and environmental impact, converting what was once voluntary reputational messaging into a mandatory, enforceable line item.^[25] Singapore has moved in step, with the Singapore Exchange phasing in mandatory climate-related disclosures aligned with international sustainability standards for listed issuers and large non-listed companies.^[26] Under Singapore’s ISSB-aligned framework, the logic from the investors’ perspective is that capital should flow away from companies who are unable to manage climate risk well and toward companies that manage that risk well. This provides the economic incentive for companies to take genuine steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

17   The trouble is that this logic depends on ESG disclosure being reliable, and whether the market is willing to even subscribe and promote sustainable practices. Greenwashing, which involves overstating environmental credentials without matching substance, remains difficult for outside investors to detect, let alone litigate. The past two years have also seen a pronounced political backlash against ESG in parts of the United States, with several major asset managers scaling back climate commitments or dropping ESG branding altogether amid accusations that it improperly subordinates financial returns to political preference.^[27] This matters for the question of effectiveness. As ESG is highly dependent on market and political sentiments, it is only ever as durable as the sentiments that sustain it, and can be unwound as quickly as it was built. ESG, in other words, has been genuinely transformative in reframing how capital thinks about climate risk, but the risk that climate considerations become a fad susceptible to market forces remains.

(c)   Domestic and international efforts

18   If litigation and ESG represent bottom-up pressure on individual actors, the clearest top-down development in the past year has been the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion of 23 July 2025.^[28] Delivered unanimously, it held that states bear binding legal obligations to prevent environmental harm, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and face accountability, including reparations, for climate damage.^[29] This was the first time the ICJ authoritatively interpreted states' legal duties in relation to climate change, prompted by a campaign that began with law students at the University of the South Pacific before being carried to the UN General Assembly by Vanuatu with the backing of over 130 states.^[30] Commentators have called the opinion "bold" for articulating specific legal standards, such as due diligence, and for the urgency with which it insists states must act given the scientific consensus.^[31] It has also been called "far-reaching" for the breadth of issues it touches, including states' obligations to preserve the marine environment and prevent marine pollution.^[32]

19   Yet, the Court itself was candid about the limits of what international law can achieve, observing that a lasting solution to the climate crisis will ultimately require human will and wisdom at the individual, social and political level to change our habits and way of life — international law can point the way, but cannot substitute for real change.^[33] This is the ICJ opinion's real significance: it is a normative compass, in the vein of the shift Rhiti describes, rather than an enforcement mechanism. Advisory opinions carry authoritative weight in shaping litigation, multilateral negotiation, and the development of customary international law, but they impose no direct remedy for a state that ignores them. The opinion's ultimate effect therefore depends entirely on domestic uptake — on whether states have both the capacity and the political will to translate an international standard into binding local law.

20   Singapore is a useful case study of that translation in practice, and of its limits when dealing with thorny climate issues. Domestically, Singapore's environmental law regime is often held up as highly effective in urban pollution control and resource management, thanks to the National Environment Agency's strict, well-resourced enforcement powers, and reinforced by legislation such as the Carbon Pricing Act, which has progressively raised the domestic carbon tax.^[34] Despite its operational effectiveness, the key issue remains the limited avenues for public participation in environmental decision-making, which aligns with the substantive judicial and procedural avenues Chng identifies as constrained by the common law's institutional caution.^[35]

21   Two recent land-use controversies illustrate what this looks like in practice. At Maju Forest, HDB has at least gestured toward balance, proposing to retain most of the secondary forest and build ecological corridors around planned housing, even as the "Save Maju Forest" petition, now past 10,000 signatures, points out that alternative sites such as the Keppel Club redevelopment could absorb comparable housing need without touching mature forest.^[36] The government's more recent proposal to merge several southern islands into a new "Western Island" for power generation and defence infrastructure^[37] sits at the harder end of this spectrum: it would reclaim nearly five islands with fringing reefs and at least six submerged reefs in their entirety, a loss of marine habitat that no amount of post-reclamation restoration could meaningfully reverse, given these reefs' role in seeding biodiversity across the wider national waters. In neither case does an environmental impact assessment, as currently structured, offer the public a meaningful point of entry before the underlying trade-off between development and conservation has already been struck. Hence, the question of effectiveness remains  difficult to answer – the  instrument exists, but what it is actually meant to safeguard, and for whom, remains far less settled.

22   Lim and Varottil suggest one route around this bottleneck: public enforcement through securities regulation.^[38]Securities regulators across Hong Kong, Singapore and India are increasingly introducing climate-specific disclosure requirements, which would let regulators act on discrete, provable breaches of disclosure rules rather than relying on the diffuse and evidentially demanding concept of "materiality."^[39] As deterrence is a central goal of public enforcement, and because regulators have the resources to deploy compensation orders and disgorgement against companies that mis-disclose climate risk, this route may do quietly through securities law what private and public interest litigation has struggled to achieve directly.^[40]

V. Conclusion

23   In environmental law, the dominant sentiment might best be summed up as: knocking a domino goes a long way.^[41] None of the developments above, be they in fiduciary duty litigation, ESG disclosure, international law, or securities-based enforcement, amounts to a silver bullet that will save the world. Each is a small win – a win in that they each represent a shift in dominant sentiment to one that acknowledges and promises to do more for the environment, but a small one in that they remain partial, contested, and reversible. While it is easy to dismiss each win as small, each is a win nonetheless, and perhaps, environmental law’s effectiveness lies instead in the slow accumulation of precedents that narrow, case by case and statute by statute, the room left for inaction. It is hoped that a rising tide lifts all boats, but whether that accumulation moves fast enough to outrun the physical thresholds we are approaching is an empiric, and more frightening question that science needs to answer, than whether the law is "working" at all. Ultimately, however, it is only by first knocking each domino that we are able to begin the fight against climate change at all.

References

^[1] Fred Pearce, "Overshoot: The World Is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate," Yale Environment 360 (28 January 2026)https://e360.yale.edu/features/1.5-degrees-tipping-points (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ajit Niranjan, "Trees may store less planet-heating carbon than hoped, study suggests," The Guardian (13 June 2026)https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/13/trees-store-less-carbon-than-thought-study (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[4] Susan Q. Stranahan, "Melting Arctic Ocean Raises Threat of 'Methane Time Bomb'," Yale Environment 360 (30 October 2008)https://e360.yale.edu/features/melting_arctic_ocean_raises_threat_of_methane_time_bomb (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[5] Hyronimus Rhiti, "The Environment As A Legal Subject: A Post-Humanist Philosophical Perspective," International Journal of Science and Environment, 2025 https://ijsenet.com/index.php/IJSE/article/view/243 (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Kenny Chng, "Conceptualising A Role For The Common Law In Environmental Protection In Singapore," (2021) 16(2) Asian Journal of Comparative Law 218–237.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Conor MacDonald & Charles Slidders, "Fiduciary duties: the next frontier of climate litigation," Center for International Environmental Law(21 July 2026) https://www.ciel.org/fiduciary-duty-lawsuits-climate-risk/ (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Ernest Lim & Umakanth Varottil, "Climate Risk: Enforcement of Corporate and Securities Law in Common Law Asia," (2022) 22 Journal of Corporate Law Studies 391–430.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16]Reuters, "TotalEnergies must address climate risks linked to its products, French court rules," The Guardian (25 June 2026)https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/25/paris-partial-victory-totalenergies-climate-risks-case (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Milieudefensie et al v Royal Dutch Shell plc, Climate Litigation Database (Sabin Center for Climate Change Law)https://www.climatecasechart.com/document/milieudefensie-et-al-v-royal-dutch-shell-plc_c3e4 (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh & Jan Paul van Soest, "Comparing two court rulings on Shell's carbon emissions with climate-policy science," Energy Research & Social Science (2026), DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104568https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626000393 (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[22] Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, "Climate litigation increasingly reaching the highest courts around the world, report finds," London School of Economics (25 June 2025) https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/climate-litigation-more-often-reaching-the-highest-courts-around-the-world-report-finds/ (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[23] Emilie Jones, "Climate litigation enters a new phase as corporate liability claims gain momentum," Out-Law, Pinsent Masons (23 July 2026)https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/analysis/climate-litigation-corporate-liability-claims-gain-momentum (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[24] ScienceDirect Topics, "Stakeholder Theory," Elsevier https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/stakeholder-theory (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[25] European Commission, "Corporate sustainability reporting," Finance – European Commission (last updated 3 July 2026)https://finance.ec.europa.eu/financial-markets/company-reporting-and-auditing/company-reporting/corporate-sustainability-reporting_en(accessed 27 July 2026).

^[26] Singapore Exchange (SGX), "Sustainability Reporting" https://www.sgx.com/sustainable-finance/sustainability-reporting (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[27]  Ken Rivlin & Felise Cooper, "ESG trends in the U.S.: navigating fragmentation, backlash, and energy security," A&O Shearman, Sustainability Outlook 2026 (26 February 2026) https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/sustainability-outlook-2026/esg-trends-in-the-us-navigating-fragmentation-backlash-and-energy-security (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[28] International Court of Justice, Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, Advisory Opinion of 23 July 2025, ICJ General List No. 187 https://www.icj-cij.org/case/187/advisory-opinions (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[29] Maria Antonia Tigre, Maxim Bönnemann & Antoine De Spiegeleir, "The ICJ's Advisory Opinion on Climate Change: An Introduction," VerfBlog (24 July 2025) https://verfassungsblog.de/the-icj-advisory-opinion-on-climate-change/ (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Ibid.

^[32] Ibid.

^[33] Sara K. Phillips, Emily Ghosh, Dayoon Kim, Albert Salamanca & Kate Williamson, "Unpacking what the ICJ's advisory opinion means for climate and environmental action," Stockholm Environment Institute (28 July 2025) https://www.sei.org/perspectives/icj-opinion-climate-environmental-action/ (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[34] Gary Chan Kok Yew, "Environmental Pollution Control in Singapore" (2020) 2(1) Vietnamese Journal of Legal Sciences, DOI: 10.2478/vjls-2020-0005 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/sol_research/article/4968/&path_info=10.2478_vjls_2020_0005_pvoa_cc_by.pdf (accessed 27 July 2026).

^[35] Kenny Chng, "Conceptualising A Role For The Common Law In Environmental Protection In Singapore," (2021) 16(2) Asian Journal of Comparative Law 218–237.

^[36] Terry Xu, “Singapore's environmental studies keep finding reasons not to build. So why do we build anyway?”, The Online Citizen (14 July 2026) https://theonlinecitizen.com/2026/07/14/singapore-s-environmental-studies-keep-finding-reasons-not-to-build-so-why-do-we-build-anyway(accessed 24 August 2026).

^[37] Ang Qing, “NDR 2026: S’pore to merge several outer islands to form new western island”, The Straits Times (23 August 2026) https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/ndr-2026-spore-to-merge-several-outer-islands-to-form-new-western-island (accessed 24 August 2026).

^[38]  Ernest Lim & Umakanth Varottil, "Climate Risk: Enforcement of Corporate and Securities Law in Common Law Asia," (2022) 22 Journal of Corporate Law Studies 391–430.

^[39]  Ibid.

^[40]  Ibid.

^[41] Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh & Jorge E. Viñuales, "Bracing for impact: the ICJ Advisory Opinion on climate change and the activation of legal tipping points," Journal of Environmental Law, eqag014 (19 June 2026) https://academic.oup.com/jel/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jel/eqag014/8711804 (accessed 27 July 2026).