As the world watched Los Angeles burn, to Australians the harsh realities of climate change feel all too familiar. The changing climate means days go by without rain, or it rains too much. Dry conditions and wind make our landscape susceptible to fire. All of these weather events have real-world consequences for our clients and community.
Last year, South-East Monash Legal Service started a pilot program to better understand the legal consequences of climate change. That’s how we developed the South-Eastern Climate Justice Project.
Our pilot program was designed to:
- Uncover whether climate change is impacting the legal rights of individuals
- Educate staff on what climate justice means for existing laws and rights
- Better understand how existing laws and policies can be used to protect individuals impacted by climate change
- Gain a greater understanding of the scope to which our community in the southeast has already been impacted by climate change.
The more we explored the consequences of climate change, the more we found that the climate crisis is already infiltrating every aspect of our lives. This blog post covers some of our insights from this project.
Climate change has everyday legal consequences
The impacts of climate change are already being felt by many of our clients. These impacts can make access to justice more challenging and existing legal problems worse. As a legal service, we need to be prepared to respond to how climate change both creates and exacerbates legal issues for our community.
Over the past year, we met with community members to discuss how they experience climate impacts. From these conversations, we’ve learned:
- Climate impacts often intersect with other legal issues, such as employment law, tenancy or family law.
- Lower-income households are more vulnerable to climate impacts due to limited financial resources to adapt or recover.
- Extreme weather events (such as heatwaves and storms) make it harder for people to maintain safe housing conditions.
- Rising temperatures are increasing the prevalence of mould in rental properties, causing health issues for tenants.
- Workplace safety concerns are growing due to extreme heat, particularly for outdoor and manual laborers.
- Displacement and relocations from floods or bushfires put families under significant financial and emotional strain.
- Vulnerable groups, such as migrants and older adults, may struggle to access information and support tailored to their needs during climate events.
- Access to transportation, healthcare, and essential services is becoming more difficult during extreme weather events.
It’s clear that climate change is already increasing legal need in our communities. When we look at these impacts through a justice lens, we can see that climate change has compounding consequences for our clients.
Some are feeling the legal impacts of climate change first and worst
Climate change is not just an environmental issue, but a justice issue with real social and ethical consequences. While climate change affects everyone, its impacts are not felt equally. Often, those who have historically contributed the least to climate change are the ones who feel its impacts first and worst. This includes people from marginalised communities, such as First Nations people or migrant workers. It also includes people who may be on a low income, facing insecure housing, living in remote areas or facing precarious employment.
When we talk about navigating legal responses through a climate justice lens, we are advocating for legal responses that recognise these injustices and take a proactive response to the real impacts of climate change that many in our community are already facing. As a legal service, it’s our job to not only highlight the environmental concerns our community have, but also to prioritise fairness, equality, and the protection of vulnerable communities. Responses to climate change must actively work to reduce existing social and economic inequalities, rather than perpetuate or worsen them.
We’ve incorporated this understanding into our climate response by proactively discussing the impacts of climate change with our clients and ensuring we have appropriate outreach and community legal education in place.
Lawyers can draw on existing legislation to help individuals impacted by climate change
As lawyers, we may feel under-equipped to deal with the legal challenges posed by global climate change. While there is still much that we can improve in our legislation, the good news is that there are existing avenues that we can take to protect our clients from climate impacts.
In our own practice at South-East Monash Legal Service, we’ve used existing legislation to take a climate-conscious approach to helping our clients. We’ve found that protections in acts (such as the Fair Work Act 2009 or Family Violence Protection Act 2008 as limited examples) can offer more useful pathways to protecting individuals than climate-specific acts, which often focus on the wider-reaching impacts of climate change.
Adaption, mitigation and informed justice responses
As we build our response to climate change, the South-Eastern Climate Justice Program recognises that we also need to focus on climate mitigation. We must stop global temperatures from increasing and end our reliance on fossil fuels. However, mitigation alone is not enough. Climate impacts are here and now. Ordinary individual lives and legal rights are being affected.
We’ve seen how climate change is already impacting our community. We see it through the increasing risk of bushfires, rising temperatures, and severe weather events, all of which affect housing, livelihoods, and our overall well-being. By identifying these challenges, we can provide targeted legal solutions and resources to help our community adapt and thrive.
Justice responses need to understand the compounding disadvantages that climate crisis can pose for individuals. Climate change does not choose or distinguish its victims, but some are better resourced than others to manage and adapt to its impacts. This is a justice problem, and it requires justice solutions.
To learn more about the South-Eastern Climate Justice Program or make a referral, contact climate@smls.com.au.
