When ESG becomes one legal issue
At the ACC Europe Conference in Copenhagen, European in-house lawyers described how climate risks, supply-chain disruption and governance expectations are converging into a single legal agenda for general counsel
by flavio caci
Experts: Yves Heijmans, general counsel EMEA at Chevron Phillips Chemical; Rafael Merencio, general counsel at Koenig & Bauer Banknote Solutions; Dirk Kessler, general counsel global procurement at Nestlé; Timo Spitzer, executive director and head of legal at Santander CIB Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordic Countries.
For Europe’s general counsel, ESG is no longer a set of three parallel workstreams. Climate risks affect supply chains, supplychain disruption reshapes sustainability commitments, and governance is becoming the mechanism through which companies try to hold the agenda together.
That was one of the clearest messages emerging from conversations at the ACC Europe Conference in Copenhagen, where MAG followed the debate on stage and spoke with in-house lawyers on the sidelines of the event.
Across those exchanges, a common thread emerged: ESG ambitions are increasingly being tested by geopolitical instability, regulatory divergence and operational disruption. For legal departments, this means that sustainability is no longer just a reporting exercise. It is becoming part of a broader legal agenda that connects risk, procurement, governance and corporate strategy.
ENVIRONMENT: WHEN AMBITION MEETS REGULATORY DIVERGENCE
Among the three ESG pillars, the environmental dimension appeared to be facing the most immediate pressure. The issue is no longer only how companies set long-term sustainability targets, but how they keep those targets credible while markets, regulation and geopolitical conditions continue to shift. For Yves Heijmans, general counsel EMEA at Chevron Phillips Chemical, the challenge is to ensure that sustainability ambitions remain realistic without losing strategic direction.
“The priority now is setting aspirations that remain achievable in real-world conditions, while adjusting where needed as markets and regulation evolve,” he said on the sidelines of his intervention at the conference, during a thematic panel on the topic.
A central difficulty, according to Hejmans, is the growing fragmentation of ESG regulation. Europe is developing increasingly structured sustainability reporting requirements, while the United States remains characterised by a more fragmented, state-driven approach.
“For companies like ours, this means evolving our reporting approach to address different jurisdictional requirements while maintaining an internally harmonised source of data across systems and alignment across functions. It can also create strategic tension, as different regions move at different speeds, making it challenging to maintain a coherent global ESG narrative”.
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