TRACING SCOPE 3 EMISSIONS: LEGAL LIABILITIES AND COMPLIANCE BURDENS FOR MULTINATIONAL SUPPLY CHAINS IN GLOBAL SOUTH JURISDICTIONS

Abstract

The regulatory centre of gravity in transnational climate governance is shifting from a firm's own operations to the diffuse, layered emissions embedded in its supply chain. Scope 3 emissions, which for most multinational enterprises constitute the overwhelming share of their carbon footprint, are increasingly the subject of mandatory disclosure and due diligence regimes originating in the Global North, including the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, and California's Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act. Because multinational value chains are physically anchored in the Global South, these home-state instruments extend, contractually and jurisdictionally, into economies whose domestic legal and institutional infrastructure for greenhouse gas measurement, reporting and verification remains nascent. This paper examines the resulting asymmetry between where climate-related legal liability is adjudicated and where the compliance burden is actually absorbed. It traces the doctrinal architecture of parent-company duty of care through Vedanta Resources plc v Lungowe and Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell plc, assesses the limits of Scope 3 justiciability exposed by the Hague Court of Appeal in Milieudefensie v Shell plc, and evaluates India's Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework and constitutional environmental jurisprudence as a case study of a major Global South jurisdiction caught between externally imposed obligations and internal capacity deficits. The paper argues that the present configuration displaces compliance cost downward while retaining liability and remedial authority upstream, and proposes a differentiated framework of tiered materiality thresholds, mutual recognition of domestic measurement regimes, and bounded contractual liability calibrated to actual supplier influence.