Funding the legal infrastructure for corporate nature accountability: Why an ecosystem approach matters
01/07/2026
By Seema Joshi, Legal Strategy Director, Accountability Accelerator
Read the report: From Shared Diagnosis to Stronger Strategy.
As environmental degradation accelerates and its impacts are increasingly felt by ecosystems and communities around the world, the role of law in shaping corporate behaviour and accountability for nature is expanding.
A growing number of jurisdictions are requiring companies to take steps to identify, prevent and address environmental and human rights harms throughout their operations and supply chains. Companies required to report under the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) will begin doing so within the next two years, significantly expanding mandatory environmental due diligence obligations.
At the international level, the 2025 International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on Climate Change affirmed that states have obligations under international law to regulate corporate emitters, while the High Seas Treaty, which came into force earlier this year, represents a significant opportunity to strengthen protections for marine biodiversity. Meanwhile legal accountability for large-scale environmental destruction – or for conduct comparable to ecocide – is rapidly emerging across jurisdictions globally.
Alongside these encouraging developments, significant headwinds remain. Geopolitical pressures, weak enforcement of existing laws, and shrinking civic space are limiting progress and reshaping what meaningful accountability for nature looks like in practice.
In addition, funding for nature is declining just when it is needed most urgently. Having worked closely with United Nations and OECD processes on strengthening corporate accountability for human rights over the past 20 years, I have seen firsthand how the shared belief and energy built in the wake of the Paris Agreement and Kunming-Montreal Protocol have tailed off more recently, leaving fragmentation and a lack of shared vision among the funding community.
The corporate accountability gap remains, and it is time to reignite both hope and investment in the systems, policies and legal frameworks that can drive a shift in corporate behaviour. As underscored through numerous discussions at London Climate Action Week last month, now is the moment to build on the significant legal gains that we have made over the past two decades. Legal implementation is key. The opportunity is now to translate these wins into tangible and positive impact on the ground.
A legal ecosystem for nature
Against this backdrop, a diverse group of legal practitioners, Indigenous Peoples, civil society organizations, researchers, funders, campaigners and communities around the world are engaged in legal work to prevent and address corporate harms to nature, and protect the people that depend on it.
In 2025, the Accountability Accelerator set out to better understand the current landscape: who is working within it, what they are prioritizing, where they are seeing impact, and what barriers are hindering progress. We identified over 150 organisations around the world working on legal approaches to corporate accountability for nature.
Our questionnaire received responses from 102 individuals across 52 countries, including funders, re-granters and implementing organisations such as legal practitioners, NGOs and activists. The responses point to an active, experienced field of practitioners that has already undertaken impactful legal and strategic work. While many actors identified shared priorities – representing some clear opportunities for immediate action – opportunities for coordination, collaboration and shared learning remain largely untapped.
Our central finding is clear: building a more connected and coordinated ecosystem of actors working on legal approaches to corporate nature accountability could significantly increase the collective impact of this work and lead to meaningful change. Stronger networks, alliances and more strategic resourcing would help transform a diverse set of efforts into a powerful ecosystem capable of accelerating meaningful change.
Shared priorities and opportunities for action
Despite the diversity of priorities identified through the survey, there was notable alignment between implementers, funders and re-granters on some key issues. Most significantly, land-related impacts and Indigenous Peoples’ rights were widely recognised as priorities across respondent groups. This level of convergence is important, reflecting clear recognition that efforts to address corporate harms to nature cannot be separated from questions of land governance, Indigenous Rights, stewardship, and justice.
Alongside these shared priorities, stakeholder groups also identified areas of more specialized focus. For example, re-granters highlighted issues such as commodity supply chains, greenwashing, and just transition approaches requiring greater attention, while implementers also identified the human right to a clean and healthy environment as a high priority.
Stepping back, these perspectives all complement each other, underscoring the benefits of creating and resourcing stronger networks, alliances, and trust-based relationships between actors. This would enable practitioners to share knowledge, avoid duplication, address blindspots, and identify opportunities earlier – building stronger, connected legal approaches across the field.
The gaps holding the field back
Alongside the opportunities, the mapping also revealed important areas where strengthening corporate accountability is being overlooked, such as impacts of environmental destruction on children, for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and oceans being neglected despite their health being fundamental to human existence.
One of the most consistent findings was a perceived lack of funding to support civil society actors. With increased competition for funding, implementers expressed real concerns over resourcing at a time when they are facing not only reputational and legal threats, but risks to their personal safety.
Respondents pointed to real gains where corporate accountability laws have come into force, with more cases than ever reaching courts, and more instances of judgments calling for companies to provide remedies for environmental harms. Yet a notable gap emerged when respondents looked at how success is measured, with markers associated with remedy as defined by international law largely uncited. This supports the broader perspective that legal enforcement is the biggest problem holding society back from preventing corporate harms to nature.
Taken together, these findings indicate a broader shared concern: where laws exist, the challenge is increasingly one of implementation and enforcement. Laws and accountability mechanisms are emerging, but without sufficient funding and support for enforcement, their impact remains limited.
Building a stronger ecosystem
Our findings lead to a clear conclusion: investment in the ecosystem of actors engaged in legal work to prevent corporate harms to nature is needed, in order to catalyze action on shared priorities, build further alignment, and accelerate implementation.
Within the Accountability Accelerator’s work, we propose developing practical tools to guide and enable strategic support of this ecosystem by funders, as well as a focus on facilitating collaboration and building better alignment among re-granters and legal actors.
More broadly, we see the following as critical focus areas for building a stronger ecosystem:
- Expanding funding and priorities
Addressing stakeholder concerns around funding will require greater investment in multi-year, flexible funding models that support community-focused legal approaches. There are also opportunities for investment in areas where clear consensus already exists, including land-related impacts, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, evidence collection, stronger connections between local and global actors, and legal advocacy. Improved landscape mapping, collaboration, and follow-through on identified priorities would help ensure that resources are deployed strategically and effectively.
- Investing in ecosystem orchestration
Investment in coordination and network building would help address blind spots and gaps, as well as a concerted effort to improve funder awareness of resourcing needs and opportunities, and a drive to de-silo different corporate accountability approaches.
- Strengthening evidence and networks
Scaling up evidence collection, building community databases, removing barriers to information, and advancing knowledge-sharing and cross-border legal networks could significantly strengthen legal efforts across the field.
Law is fundamental to incentivizing a necessary shift in corporate behaviour on nature. The opportunity in front of us is not simply about funding more projects, but also building the infrastructure to connect and scale existing ones, so that they achieve more together than alone. Many of the foundations and frameworks already exist. The next step is investing in the relationships, coordination and shared capacity needed to build a connected, powerful legal ecosystem and secure protection and justice for people and nature.
The Accountability Accelerator will be exploring what we can do as an ecosystem of re-granters to drive change in this space during an open online discussion this September. Stay connected to receive more information.
Read the report, From Shared Diagnosis to Stronger Strategy.
