5. Conclusion

Organisations in the legal assistance sector are working hard to respond to everyday legal problems. To take a climate justice-oriented approach that is broader in scope than just disaster recovery legal assistance, they need to do a few things. First, organisations and funders need to shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset that is climate conscious. This means increased efforts in law reform, CLE and network building to proactively protect people from legal harms arising from climate change, not reactively help them pick up the pieces. Second, organisations must continue to apply their significant knowledge and understanding of the impacts of trauma and its intersection with legal problems. Third, organisations in the legal assistance sector should continue to prioritise deep cross-sector and intra-sector engagement and collaboration to strengthen holistic service provision. And finally, organisations and individuals need to embrace systems thinking and an expanded outlook about the role of legal assistance services, together with the capacity to see broader causes of legal problems. These are all key ingredients for delivering effective access to justice in a climate changed world.

Climate change is reshaping legal practice. As a future climate conscious lawyer, the challenge of ensuring access to justice in a climate changed world means approaching lawyering in a way that is ethically grounded, community responsive, innovative and resilient. Climate change is a poverty-making machine that deepens inequality, disrupts livelihoods and compounds disadvantages. Climate change needs to be acknowledged as a driver of injustice across our public legal service system. This requires adequate resourcing across all state and national frameworks for legal assistance.^[1]