We have known for decades that climate change disproportionately affects people living in poverty. This becomes starkly evident during climate disasters like bushfires, floods and storms, which exacerbate social inequities and create legal problems relating to tenancy, insurance, employment and discrimination.
But climate change impacts are more widespread than sudden onset disasters. Slow onset impacts can be less visible yet equally harmful, and climate change is also fundamentally disrupting how we work as lawyers. This shows that climate change is not merely an environmental dilemma but a profound social justice issue and, correspondingly, highly relevant to Australia’s legal assistance sector that is tasked with helping people whose legal problems interface with poverty, discrimination or social exclusion.
My doctoral research over the past four years has focused on how climate change shapes everyday civil law problems, and how prepared Australia’s legal assistance sector is to meet those changing needs.
I gathered insights from legal assistance sector lawyers across the country to explore two key areas: their observations on how climate change is influencing civil legal needs, and their views on legal assistance sector readiness to address this changing work.
Complex problems and habitability as an example of slow onset impacts
The lawyers who I surveyed and interviewed overwhelmingly believed that climate change is contributing to both the prevalence and complexity of civil law problems. Lawyers perceived that the legal work is becoming more entangled with broader social and emotional concerns.
One lawyer I spoke to said that it feels like the ‘pit is getting deeper’ for the clients they assist. While this observation mainly related to disasters, lawyers also described how climate change generates legal problems outside the disaster cycle. A good example is in the realm of housing, where homes are becoming less habitable due to encroaching mould, moisture, extreme heat, dust, and air pollution.
Reduced habitability not only triggers tenancy disputes but can also give rise to workplace health and safety, employment, social security and/or discrimination law problems. Findings on declining habitability and its knock-on effect across civil law has not been empirically identified before, so this research extends our understanding of how climate change (beyond disasters) is altering civil law needs.
The importance of geography, place and local knowledge
Lawyers who participated in this study also reinforced the importance of geography, place and local knowledge in delivering legal services. They described how place-based work in disasters was essential to identifying local legal needs.
Tensions between local and top-down, centralised approaches were identified, with many lawyers emphasising that local knowledge is key to effective, trauma-informed legal assistance. But place-based work also takes its toll on those in the sector, with lawyers describing the presence of fatigue and burnout as features of disaster recovery legal work. Lawyers were both aware of this and highly committed to the work that they do. They commented on the rewarding nature of disaster legal assistance whilst also conceding that they are under huge pressure because of disasters and climate change, beyond their usual levels of stress and workload.
Reactively situated: disaster recovery legal services
A steady increase in public funding for disaster recovery legal services in recent years has enabled the legal assistance sector to respond to initial surges in demand, followed by the subsequent prolonged periods of legal help that can take years to provide.
Lawyers involved in this study emphasised the importance of planning and foresight to move beyond a reactive disaster recovery approach. They wanted to see greater flexibility in service design and more opportunities to proactively assist people to legally prepare for disasters.
One lawyer aptly described the current approach as ‘simply chucking the legal band-aid on the bleeding sore each time some disaster happens.’ A greater focus on systemic law reform to fix laws that are not fit for purpose in a changing climate, and community legal education to improve awareness of common legal problems, may not only help clients but also lawyers themselves.
One lawyer identified potential workforce wellbeing aspects to practising law and designing service systems in a more adaptive way: If we actually begin to engage head on with the issues in our practice of the law, we’ll develop more resilience, we’ll build better systems, we’ll feel actively engaged, and that will give us hope and probably offset some of the existential anxiety that we might be feeling and enable us to respond more effectively to the disasters, and emergencies that happen. So I think a climate adaptive practice of law is by definition, something that will enable us to cope better psychologically.
The issue of funding
Even though lawyers cogently identified an association between climate change and civil law problems, they did not think the legal assistance sector was adequately equipped to address growing service demand associated with climate change.
This was due to a range of factors, the most prominent being the paucity of sector funding. This issue was a prevailing theme in my study, with evidence that legal assistance sector agencies are constantly reassessing their ability to deliver programs and services due to funding shortfalls. Although funding was raised more by community sector lawyers than by those working at legal aid or other agencies, it was an issue that spanned all pillars of assistance.
This finding led me to conclude that without adequate resources to maintain a sustainable workforce, the sector will struggle to build the organisational resilience needed to effectively address climate change-informed legal need.
Consequently, there is a need for investment in the following areas:
- Workforce sustainability, including staff wellbeing initiatives to prevent burnout, and the development of professional skillsets for ‘disaster lawyering’;
- Law reform and community legal education activities, so the sector can address deficiencies in laws as they relate to climate change, and better support individuals and communities to legally prepare for climate change;
- Networking and engagement between agencies within and between the legal assistance sector and externally, such as disaster management personnel and organisations delivering climate adaptation programs and initiatives;
- Place-based services, so they are sufficiently resourced to sustain collaborations with local agencies and can uphold the justice issues of communities in local climate adaptation programs.
Finally, for the legal assistance sector to take a climate justice-oriented approach that is broader in scope than disaster recovery legal work, the following actions drawn from the study are also recommended:
- Develop a national statement of principles on climate justice for the legal assistance sector. A key statement objective must be to centre the role and expertise of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their relationship to country and care for country.
- Expand the category of disaster recovery legal assistance to include sustainable and flexible climate justice-related legal work. This will enable anticipatory and adaptive legal work to support new justice challenges, for example, working with communities in transition.
- Integrate climate justice work across general legal assistance legal services in addition to ongoing resourcing for activities undertaken by specialist environmental legal centres.
- Include environmental and climate indicators in any future legal need studies to deepen our understanding of the relationship between geography, poverty and legal need in a changing climate.
Climate change is a legally disruptive polycrisis that compels us to reimagine new ways of delivering access to justice in the Anthropocene.1 The results of this study underscore the need for climate change – not merely disaster recovery legal services – to be acknowledged as a driver of injustice, and to be adequately resourced across all state and national frameworks for legal assistance.
Readers who are interested in more detail can visit this open access publication which provides additional information about research findings, including study methods and materials: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09695958.2025.2458031
Footnotes
1 Elizabeth Fisher, Eloise Scotford and Emily Barritt, ‘The Legally Disruptive Nature of Climate Change’ (2017) 80(2) The Modern Law Review 173.
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