ABSTRACT
Corporate responsibility for the environment has become a major issue with the advent of concern about climate change. The general public first became aware of environmental pollution from industry as early as the 1960s. This chapter provides an outline for how corporations bear a responsibility for the environment in general but with a particular purview to climate change. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations, signed by almost 200 countries in 2015, are examples of the recent turn to global governance of bottom-up processes also seen in the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015. The SDGs raise several practical questions about how a corporation can contribute to the goals, which cannot be explored here. Instead, the SDGs also raise more theoretical and philosophical questions about corporate responsibility. The SDGs raise the probability in general that second-order collective duties to combat climate change fall onto corporations.
