Abstract

The sense of urgent necessity to reduce climate change has forced multinational corporations to exhibit audacious pledges in regard to net-zero emissions of GHGs. Nevertheless, there always remains the difference between the voluntary commitments and the measurable performance results that have resulted in environmental and legal risks to credibility. Its paper examines how multinationals can fulfill both binding and voluntary climate pledges, including the Paris Agreement, national climate targets, through the enforceable corporate structure of compliance. Based on comparative legal analysis, governance theory and experience-based practice in segments of industry, the paper suggests a Climate Compliance Management System (CCMS) that combines regulatory requirements, voluntary standards and stakeholder compliance enforcement actions. The method permits the alignment of the decarbonization pathway with the contractual, financial and governance-related controls that in turn precondition the appropriate quantification of the climate accountability and its prosecutable nature. Compliance architectures can fill the pledgeperformance gap and offer protection against litigation risk and increased corporate resilience in the shift towards low-carbon economies, provided they are designed with cross-jurisdictional interoperability and the possibility of verifiable metrics.