The legal framework for businesses in transition

Sustainability law, the legal framework for businesses

What is sustainability law?

Sustainability law is not a separate field with a code of its own. It is the body of rules through which legislators, courts and regulators steer the use, conservation and management of natural resources. Those rules are spread across environmental law, planning law, corporate law, contract law, consumer law and financial law.

What ties them together is the definition from the 1987 UN report Our Common Future: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. With the 1992 UN Rio de Janeiro Declaration, endorsed by representatives of 179 states, sustainable development became an international legal principle. What was a principle then has largely become binding law since.

For businesses, that is the difference that counts. Sustainability has moved from ambition to obligation: reporting duties, due diligence in the supply chain, permit conditions, the burden of proof behind green claims, and liability for environmental damage. This site sets out those obligations subject by subject, with the provisions they rest on.

Over the coming decades the economy has to move to low-carbon, circular production, with sustainable water management and the recovery of biodiversity. Law is the principal instrument for steering that shift. Article 11 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union requires the Union to integrate environmental protection requirements into the definition and implementation of its policies and activities, precisely with a view to promoting sustainable development. Almost all recent sustainability legislation, from the European Green Deal to the CSRD and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, rests on that basis.

At national level the centre of gravity has shifted, since 1 January 2024, to the Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet). That Act brings together the law on building, the environment, water, soil, nature, noise and heritage, and names a safe and healthy physical living environment as an express objective. The planning instruments in Chapter 4 of the Environmental Management Act (Wet milieubeheer), including the national environmental policy plan, lapsed with it; that role is now filled by the national environment and planning strategy and the programmes under the Act. What remained in the Environmental Management Act includes the rules on substances and products, waste, emissions trading and environmental liability.