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4. Key Ingredients for Delivering Access to Justice in a Climate Changed World

There is a particular skill set needed for legal practitioners to deliver effective access to justice in a climate changed world. Drawing on our combined expertise as lawyers working across the legal assistance sector, and our scholarly work, we have distilled these skills into four key ingredients:

  1. Developing climate conscious lawyering approaches that are resilient and sustainable;
  2. Cultivating the knowledge and skills to practice trauma-informed lawyering;
  3. Developing the capacity for deep collaboration towards holistic service delivery; and
  4. A systemic mindset.

Whether you gravitate towards working at legal aid or in a community legal centre, or you see yourself as a future government or private sector lawyer, we believe these ingredients form the foundational knowledge and skills for all lawyers working in pursuit of access to justice in a climate changed world.

The next sections of this chapter describe each ingredient. We include some practical examples and case studies to help illustrate what they mean.

4.1 Climate Conscious Lawyering that is Resilient and Sustainable

Resilient lawyering spans the full climate disaster cycle — preparedness, emergency response and long-term recovery — while ensuring legal services are organisationally resilient and can withstand and adapt to extreme heat, bushfires, floods and other disruptions. This ingredient requires practitioners and organisations to cultivate flexibility, emotional strength and institutional foresight so that impacted communities receive consistent, culturally safe support when they need it most.[1]

Central to building resilience is taking a climate conscious approach that integrates an active awareness of climate change into legal practice. This staggered approach recognises the impact of climate change on legal issues and addresses them in ways that contribute to climate justice. Climate conscious lawyers acknowledge that climate change exacerbates existing barriers to justice and can lead to new types of legal problems such as climate displacement. Climate conscious lawyers identify the intersection between legal problems and climate change issues, provide advice and litigate in ways that meaningfully address these issues, while considering the immediate legal context and broader implications for the environment and society.[2]

Climate impacts rarely occur in isolation and they often act as a stress multiplier, compounding issues across housing, health, finances and family systems. A climate conscious approach helps lawyers to see the hidden role of climate disruption behind seemingly routine legal problems, and to pursue remedies that address both symptoms and root causes. Climate stressors often present in layered and indirect ways; heat stress, displacement and income loss can surface as tenancy disputes, debt, employment issues or family violence. Organisations that have climate informed intake processes are better equipped to see these connections, leading to more effective and tailored justice responses.

Early identification of climate driven legal needs enables timely intervention, preventing escalation and supporting more effective resolution. Recognising these hidden drivers also informs systemic reform, ensuring laws and services adapt to the evolving realities that communities face in the wake of climate disruption.

Ensuring communities have the tools and capabilities to respond to climate change impacts means that legal preparedness is emerging as a fundamental part of supporting climate resilience efforts (see the clinical legal education chapter for further discussion on resilience and legal preparedness). Lawyers working in access to justice will most likely be called upon to undertake disaster legal preparedness activities.

Example: Community Legal Education

A key element in empowering communities to be resilient to climate change impacts is working to mitigate or reduce the impacts of legal problems through community legal education (‘CLE’). Though not a substitute for other types of legal support, CLE involves awareness raising activities that aim ‘to educate community members about the law and legal processes in order to assist them to resolve their legal problems most effectively and participate in law reform’.[3]

CLE can be delivered in person or online. There are many highly creative methods such as theatre, music, dance and even comedy. It also includes online and paper-based ‘… resources such as factsheets, booklets and DVDs [and digital/web-based material]’.[4] Supporting people to understand the law, legal processes and the potential for future legal problems to arise improves their legal literacy.[5]

Lawyers working in access to justice must develop the skill to provide CLE, whilst also being able to engage with communities in place (such as at community events, recovery hubs and community information briefings). The Climate Justice Field Guide[6] includes a case study documenting the successful use of CLE and engagement approaches to increase legal preparedness and community resilience following an extreme storm weather event.

4.2 Cultivating Trauma-Informed Approaches in Your Practice

As a future lawyer working in access to justice, taking a trauma-informed approach to legal practice is essential. Disaster survivors are often deeply traumatised, with evidence showing this trauma can continue to impact survivors for many years. There is emerging evidence that there are also negative wellbeing impacts for lawyers undertaking this work.[7]

Learning from other professions over the last 10 years, the legal assistance sector has developed a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the impacts of trauma and its intersection with legal problems. There now exists a body of literature on the approach and frameworks that guide trauma informed lawyering.[8]

At its most fundamental, trauma-informed practice is:

… when the practitioner … puts the realities of the clients’ trauma experiences at the forefront in engaging with the client and adjusts the practice approach informed by the individual client’s trauma experience. Trauma-informed practice also encompasses the practitioner employing modes of self-care to counterbalance the effect the client’s trauma experience may have on the practitioner.[9]

Knowing how to de-escalate a situation, understanding your client’s personal boundaries and triggers, taking pauses during meetings with a client if needed, not overpromising and underdelivering, and ensuring your client does not need to repeat their story to multiple stakeholders and service providers are all examples of trauma-informed practice captured in recent research.[10]

Through this framing we can understand that a critical component in trauma-informed lawyering is to develop and hone the capacity for self-reflection, which is discussed in detail in the chapter regarding clinical legal education. Self-reflection can assist us to better support disaster-impacted clients and also manage the real risks to mental health and wellbeing that exist for us, whether we are lawyers or law students involved in disaster and climate related legal work.[11]

To be a truly trauma-informed lawyer, one must understand and be aware of the deeply interconnected nature of legal, social, financial and health problems, and take a holistic and integrated approach to legal practice — one that involves building on trusted referral pathways and collaborating across disciplines. This is the third ingredient, which we will now address.

4.3 Deep Collaboration Towards Holistic Service Provision

Climate change is complex. It demands that various professions and sectors work collaboratively with one another, and the communities they serve, so that climate justice can be holistically realised. Lawyers are traditionally trained to practice in silos, which can result in cultural, professional and institutional barriers to authentic collaboration. But when we are helping communities impacted by extreme weather events and climate impacts, our clients need their practitioners to holistically understand their problems and work with others to address them.

Legal assistance lawyers must have the ability to work collaboratively with other professionals, both legal and non-legal, as part of their skills in responding to communities impacted by climate disasters and extreme weather events.[12] Collaboration is therefore an essential ingredient in enabling access to justice because it brings diverse actors and sectors together to address the full range of interconnected issues that people can experience post disaster. Working in collaboration reduces the siloing of service systems. Learning how to collaborate authentically and effectively is a professional skill that can take many years. We recommend you make good use of available guides, toolkits and the broader research and evidence on design principles for effective collaboration.[13]

4.3.1 Cross-Sector Collaboration

Collaborating across sectors involves strategic collaboration between agencies and sectors beyond the legal assistance sector — for example, a community legal centre (‘CLC’) or a coalition of CLCs working with health, emergency, human and social support services to address intersecting, complex and compounding problems that people often face in times of crisis. A good example is what occurred during the 2019–20 bushfires and COVID-19 pandemic. Health Justice Australia remarked, ‘More than ever before, the crises of this period demonstrated the importance of health, legal and other human services working together to collaborate around the needs of the people and communities they serve.’[14]

As a climate conscious, legal assistance sector lawyer, you must develop the skills to engage and work collaboratively with (non-legal) community, emergency and other service professionals to address social, financial and related health issues that intersect with an individual’s post-disaster legal problem and recovery. All lawyers must take care not to see people as one dimensional, or just ‘a legal problem to be solved’. It is crucial that we see people holistically, as humans whose lives, experiences and problems hold multiple dimensions that we cannot and should not attempt to solve alone. Collaborating with organisations providing disaster recovery support services can be crucial in addressing the complexity of issues that affect a person’s ability to resolve their legal problem.

Writing from the perspective of CLCs, Taylor and Lay describe cross-sector collaboration:

Climate change is a diffuse problem that calls for integrated solutions; it cannot be adequately addressed through a siloed approach … forming interagency partnerships to deliver comprehensive wraparound support and to reach clients with the least legal capability will support fast, effective resolution of legal problems arising from extreme weather and slow-onset events.[15]

For example, problems with insurance abound post disaster, at a time when people are potentially experiencing significant trauma.[16] Having a strong understanding and relationship with key referral services means lawyers can connect people with social and emotional wellbeing support services. This may assist them (and you as the lawyer) to address complex insurance-related legal problems.

4.3.2 Legal Sector Collaboration

As the above example demonstrates, you will likely be exposed to a diverse, broad and often tangled mess of legal problems. Lawyers cannot be expected to hold knowledge across so many diverse, complex and often highly technical areas of law. The ability to recognise limitations and use referral pathways to find the most appropriate legal support for your client is essential. You should therefore be aware of, and work collaboratively with, specialist free legal services, pro bono legal help and any existing central referral pathways such as Disaster Legal Help Victoria, Disaster Legal Help (Queensland) or Disaster Response Legal Services in New South Wales.

4.4 A Systemic Mindset

A systemic mindset is the final key ingredient for delivering effective access to justice in a climate changed world. Systems thinking can help identify climate justice legal needs. Systems thinking is an approach to understanding complex problems by examining how parts of a system interact, influence one another and contribute to the behaviour of the whole. Rather than isolating components, systems thinking emphasises interconnection, feedback loops, emergence, nonlinear causality and contextual awareness.[17]

Systems thinking helps legal assistance sector lawyers consider the interconnectedness of various components within a system, rather than isolating individual parts. When we engage in systems thinking, we start to understand the broader environment that gives rise to legal problems.[18] Thinking within complexity allows us to comprehend not just immediate climate impacts but also cascading and compounding impacts.

Climate change is legally disruptive.[19] It exposes the limits of law and professional careers that are designed to thrive under stable environmental conditions. An adaptive, fit-for-purpose legal system is one that evolves ahead of harm; it is one that incorporates equity, community knowledge and resilience at its core. To see the link between climate change impacts and climate justice outcomes is to understand the interconnections between the changing nature of the places we live and how reliant our social, legal, cultural and economic lives are upon a stable and healthy environment.

Climate justice is also intersectional, in terms of how we understand and resolve issues. Intersectionality includes acknowledging history, communities, identities and institutions, as well as environments, geographies and relationships to Country.[20] Taking an intersectional approach to access to justice in the context of climate change means understanding that people experience multiple inequities through the many layers of systemic injustice. This requires us to work holistically and to simultaneously recognise and dismantle those intersecting injustices.

Circular diagram illustrating intersectionality, showing unique circumstances of power, privilege, and identity shaped by overlapping factors like race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and systemic forces.
Figure 3. Intersectionality and the law. Source: Reproduced with permission from the Reproduced with permission from the Federation of Community Legal Centres, in Climate Justice Field Guide for Community Legal Centres (2025).

4.4.1 Systemic Advocacy, Policy and Law Reform

Systemic advocacy and law reform has long been an important tool in advocating for social justice.[21] Through a climate change lens, this work aims to address the root causes of climate injustice by challenging laws, policies and regulations that can detrimentally impact communities’ interests. Law reform and strategic policy work helps to address disaster-related legal problems as part of preparedness activities.[22]

Our current legal system is not fit for purpose in a climate changed world; it must be adapted to reduce climate harm across communities and ecosystems. Many existing laws and regulatory frameworks across tenancy, construction, planning, insurance and criminal law domains remain largely blind to slow-onset climate impacts such as heat stress, mould and displacement. Without reform, these systems risk becoming maladaptive; they may exclude affected communities and lock in future climate harms. Achieving climate justice requires a fundamental shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive, anticipatory support.[23] This transformation depends on legal creativity that is inclusive of diverse legal traditions and knowledges, including the enduring wisdom of First Nations law and lore, to ensure legal systems remain relevant and regenerative.

Crucially, this transformation demands systems thinking — an approach that reveals how legal, social and ecological systems are interlinked and how interventions in one domain ripple across others. True reform must interrogate the interdependencies among legislators, regulators, planners, service providers and community leaders — challenging the assumptions that shape how laws are made, interpreted and enforced. There are many practical ‘advocacy toolkits’ which can assist legal assistance sector lawyers in this work.[24]

Case Study: South-East Monash Legal Service — the South-Eastern Climate Justice Program

Climate change is already shaping the lives and legal problems of individuals living in poverty and disadvantage. In Melbourne’s south-east, communities face compounding disadvantages, from insecure housing and precarious work to rising living costs and limited access to support services. Climate related challenges such as extreme heat, floods and bushfires further intensify these pre-existing vulnerabilities.

South-East Monash Legal Service (‘SMLS’) operates as a community legal centre dedicated to delivering access to justice for these communities. SMLS is a CLC working at the intersection of poverty, legal exclusion, and now, climate change. SMLS clients include renters in substandard housing, migrants with limited visa protections, single parents navigating family violence, people living with disabilities and low-income workers in insecure jobs. Increasingly, the legal issues they face — including evictions, work-related illness and family breakdown, are shaped by the climate crisis.

In response, SMLS launched the South-Eastern Climate Justice Program, an initiative to explore how climate change affects people’s legal rights and access to justice, and to embed climate conscious lawyering into its practice and community engagement.

Laying the Foundation: Ambition to Action

When SMLS launched the program, its ambitions were broad. SMLS staff knew that disadvantaged communities were disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, but as a workforce, SMLS itself needed to first understand how a legal service could meaningfully respond. The SMLS team returned to first principles: they immersed themselves in climate science, explored international legal developments, and engaged with experts across law, environment, and public health.

In the first year, the emphasis was on research and internal training. However, a key lesson soon emerged; SMLS had underestimated the importance of beginning with robust community engagement. Without this grounding, there was a risk that proposed solutions would be disconnected from real experiences.

SMLS course-corrected by actively seeking input from those most affected. Through focus groups, social media callouts, and surveys, SMLS learned how climate change was impacting people’s legal and personal lives: homes too hot to live in, employers refusing breaks on hot days, domestic violence worsened by climate stress, and rising housing costs after disasters. This community-led insight became foundational to the work of SMLS and continues to shape its direction.

A Unique Legal Lens: Connecting Climate Impacts to Everyday Legal Issues

SMLS’s research confirmed a striking gap. While global climate litigation had largely focused on emissions targets and environmental law, the legal system had yet to grapple with the day-to-day effects of climate change on people’s individual legal problems.

Climate change affects tenancy, employment, migration, family violence, and family law — but legal systems have not kept pace. Australia’s weak human rights protections leave few clear pathways for clients to seek redress for climate-related harm. Still, international conventions like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples offer valuable interpretive tools, and SMLS uses them to guide analysis and advocacy.

Climate Conscious Lawyering in Practice

To create meaningful change, SMLS knew that it needed to organisationally evolve. SMLS introduced internal training on climate conscious lawyering, examining how climate impacts show up in employment law, tenancy, migration, family law, and family violence. This wasn’t just theory; it was an invitation for lawyers to reimagine their roles in the face of the climate crisis.

SMLS staff responded with curiosity and conviction. They explored new arguments under general protections for workers dismissed after heatstroke and examined rent reductions and urgent repairs in the context of uninhabitable housing. Their training also prompted broader shifts — climate risk now features in outreach plans, disaster readiness protocols, and even in strategic advocacy.

Recognising the value of shared learning, SMLS offered their training to CLCs across Victoria, refining it with feedback. This culminated in a flagship full-day workshop co-hosted with the Federation of CLCs Victoria and Melbourne Law School, where practitioners, students, and experts co-created pathways for climate conscious lawyering, highlighting both the urgency and potential of cross-sector collaboration.

Community Engagement and Systemic Impact

Community engagement is now a core pillar of the program. SMLS has hosted stalls at local festivals, partnered with environment groups, and contributed to community resilience mapping. These activities both inform and are informed by the legal work of SMLS. They also build trust with groups who are often excluded from legal and climate policy processes.

SMLS’s systemic advocacy also continues to grow, and falls into three broad categories:

  • Housing and tenancy reform, including input into minimum rental standards, disaster-related tenancy frameworks, and responses to homelessness during climate events
  • Climate adaptation policy through engagement with Victoria’s Climate Change Strategy, planning laws, and resilience inquiries
  • Human rights and law reform through letters and submissions on the right to housing, equitable redevelopment, and protections for migrant workers during climate shocks

By integrating service delivery, law reform, and lived experience, SMLS aims to influence climate adaptation strategies that are just, inclusive, and grounded in community realities.

Looking Ahead

SMLS is shifting from reactive support to anticipatory, place-based lawyering. The team is building early warning systems, training lawyers in climate rights, and embedding disaster readiness into legal design. Trauma-informed, culturally safe practice remains central as SMLS supports communities shaped by exclusion and displacement. The long-term vision of SMLS is to make climate conscious thinking integral to community lawyering, because justice in a climate-affected world demands foresight, empathy, and structural change.

The South-Eastern Climate Justice Program is still evolving, but SMLS hopes it offers a roadmap for educators, lawyers and policymakers. Climate change is transforming our world, and the law must evolve with it — starting with how law is taught and practised, and how communities are supported. SMLS’s message to future lawyers is clear: climate conscious lawyering isn’t niche; it’s foundational to justice in the Anthropocene.

  1. Bronwyn Lay, Murray Raff and Clint Westig, Climate Justice Field Guide for Community Legal Centres (2025) The Federation of Community Legal Centres Victoria (1st edition). Available online: <https://www.fclc.org.au/cjfg> accessed 11 November 2025. ↵
  2. Ibid 105. ↵
  3. Ania Wilczynski, Maria Karras and Suzie Forell, ‘The outcomes of community legal education: a systematic review’ (Justice Issues Paper 18, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales, December 2014) 2. ↵
  4. Ibid. ↵
  5. Suzie Forell and Hugh M McDonald, ‘Beyond Great Expectations: Modest, Meaningful and Measurable Community Legal Education and Information’ (Justice Issues Paper 21, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales, December 2015). ↵
  6. Lay et al (n 1) 106. ↵
  7. Monica Taylor, ‘Preparing the Access to Justice Sector for Climate Change: Insights from Australian Lawyers’ (2025) 32(2) International Journal of the Legal Profession 239. ↵
  8. See, eg, Chris Maylea et al (2023) ‘With You Toolkit: Empowering Trauma Informed Rights-Based Organisations’ (La Trobe University, 2025) <https://nla-production-assets.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/public/WithYou/toolkit5.pdf>. ↵
  9. Sarah Katz and Deeya Haldar, ‘The Pedagogy of Trauma-Informed Lawyering’ (2016) 22(2) Clinical Law Review 359, 361. ↵
  10. Taylor (n 7) 239. ↵
  11. Monica Taylor, ‘Climate Crisis, Legal Education and Law Student Well-Being: Pedagogical Strategies for Action’ (2021) 40(3) The University of Queensland Law Journal, 459. ↵
  12. Emily Kothe, Catriona Mirrlees-Black and Kerryn Butler, Natural Disaster Related Legal Need in Australia: State of the Evidence (Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales, August 2024) 26. ↵
  13. See, eg, Steven Curnin, Working Together in Recovery: A Practical Guide for the Not-for-Profit and Public sectors (University of Tasmania, 2019); Bryson et al, ‘The Design and Implementation of Cross-Sector Collaborations: Propositions from the Literature’ (2006) 66(1) Public Administration Review 44. ↵
  14. Tessa Boyd-Caine, Collaboration Through the Covid19 Crisis (Health Justice Australia, 28 January 2021) 2. ↵
  15. Monica Taylor and Bronwyn Lay, ‘Community Lawyering and Climate Justice: A New Frontier’ (2022) 47(3) Alternative Law Journal 199, 202. ↵
  16. Kothe et al (n 12). ↵
  17. Diana Wright and Donella Matthews, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2009) Taylor & Francis Group ↵
  18. Lay et al (n 1) 39. ↵
  19. Elizabeth Fisher, Eloise Scotford and Emily Barritt, ‘The Legally Disruptive Nature of Climate Change’ (2017) 80(2) The Modern Law Review 173. ↵
  20. Lay et al (n 1) 39. ↵
  21. Jude McCulloch and Megan Blair, ‘From Maverick to Mainstream: Forty Years of Community Legal Centres’ (2012) 37(1) Alternative Law Journal 12. ↵
  22. Kothe et al (n 12) 22. ↵
  23. Taylor (n 7) 230. ↵
  24. Lay et al (n 1) 129. ↵
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Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer Copyright © 2024 by La Trobe University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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