Towards credible corporate net-zero commitments? On the role of unfair commercial practices law in contesting global value chain greenwashing

Corporate net-zero commitments are voluntary, forward-looking statements regarding a company’s public commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions along its global value chain (GVC). These commitments are part of a wider set of strategies that aim at reducing the environmental impact of business operations in GVCs. Whether this particular strategy of greening GVCs can meet that goal fundamentally depends on the credibility of these commitments. Without it, critics say, the pledges amount to nothing less than corporate greenwashing. In this Chapter, I discuss the various credibility concerns of corporate net-zero commitments to identify and critically analyse the potential of unfair commercial practices laws to contest this form of GVC greenwashing. By focusing the analysis on the European legal framework, I demonstrate that such laws offer important relative benefits over other domains of private law in making the corporate commitments credible. They complement and reinforce other public and private regulatory efforts to ensure the adequacy and integrity of these pledges. Unfair commercial practices law therefore constitutes an important legal strategy for regulating sustainability in GVCs, one that corporations in the chain need to recon with when communicating net-zero targets to downstream market actors.