1. Introduction

Climate change impacts and the transition to a low-carbon society are already posing fundamental challenges to key legal doctrines and principles and thereby transforming of many areas of law. Further changes to key legal doctrines and principles across all areas of law will be necessary to address the future impacts of climate change and to ensure a rapid transition to a low-carbon society that is just and equitable. The widespread legal change necessary extends beyond the specialised fields of ‘climate’ and ‘environmental’ laws and implicates all areas of law and legal practice, including corporate and fiduciary duties, property and tort law, constitutional administrative law and criminal law, as well as civil procedure, evidence law, professional obligations and many more.^[1] Legal change is already occurring through dispersed and multilevel approaches, including by way of international negotiation, domestic policymaking, climate change litigation and political activism.^[2]

This book is for all academic and practising lawyers, and law students and law academics who want to understand these legal changes in order to strategically and successfully navigate the rapidly changing legal landscape. This book provides crucial insights and resources for those who choose to use their skills and expertise to contribute towards advancing climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Law students need a transformative legal education that will support them to become ‘climate conscious’ legal professionals with the competency and knowledge to be thoughtful, strategic and successful advocates in a climate-transformed world. Many law students recognise that addressing climate change is an urgent imperative and would like to develop their skills and knowledge to promote climate mitigation and adaptation. When law graduates enter the legal profession, they need to navigate a fundamentally transformed climate context, with widespread but unequally distributed impacts experienced across systems, regions and sectors. An understanding of the impacts of climate change and its intersections with the law is necessary for law students to become strategic and successful legal professionals in a world grappling with intersecting and complex climate impacts.^[3] Finally, law students will become leaders of the profession at the middle of this century, a time at which the global community has committed to reaching ‘net zero’ emissions.^[4] They need not simply to adapt to change but drive change in their professional lives. It is therefore crucial that climate change considerations are mainstreamed across legal education.^[5]

About this Collection

This edited collection identifies the cutting-edge developments emerging in response to climate change and analyses the conceptual challenges that climate change presents to different areas of law. As the contributors to the edited collection demonstrate, greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting human activities that cause or exacerbate climate change are facilitated, regulated and limited by law. Moving beyond a siloed focus on international climate change law as a distinct legal field of sub-disciplinary knowledge, this edited collection contains chapters addressing core curriculum law subjects, as well as a range of elective subjects taught across Australian law schools. We hope that this edited collection will provide resources to embed climate change considerations throughout professionally accredited law cources, to equip the next generation of lawyers to deliver legal services and promote justice in a world transformed by climate change.

To provide the conceptual foundations for the forthcoming chapters, this introductory chapter will briefly synthesise the current state of the scientific evidence surrounding the climate crisis, with a focus on the impacts of climate change in Australia. The chapter begins by providing an overview of what is required to transition to a low-carbon society and prevent further dangerous anthropogenic interference with the global climate system (section 2). It then introduces the role of law in the changing climate context and describes legal responses to climate change at international and national levels, with a particular focus on the Australian context (section 3). In addition, the chapter highlights how all areas of law and the Australia legal system are implicated in climate change (section 4) and provides a broad overview of the skills and attributes needed to be a ‘climate conscious lawyer’ (section 5). The chapter concludes with reflections on the method and pedagogy underpinning this book (section 6), the importance of considering ‘climate anxiety’ when learning or teaching about climate change (section 7) and an outline of forthcoming chapters (section 8).