Climate and disasters
Climate change is a justice issue, and it disproportionately impacts people in regional and remote communities.
Regional and remote community legal centres adapt to weather and climate conditions
Regional and remote community legal centres adapt their service delivery in response to climate and weather patterns. Some of this is not necessarily attributable to climate change: centres plan outreaches around wet and dry season. Weather conditions and a lack of appropriate infrastructure can limit people’s access to justice if a centre is unable to do a planned outreach.
Climate change drives increasing severity and unpredictability of weather patterns, which can exacerbate these challenges.
Climate disasters create and worsen legal problems
Climate change is already driving more frequent and worsening climate disasters like fires, droughts, heatwaves, cyclones and floods. As governments continue to expand the fossil fuel industry and sideline climate mitigation measures, its impacts are set to worsen.
Disasters create and worsen legal problems related to people’s housing and tenancies, social security, debts, insurance, experience of domestic, family and sexual violence, and child protection. These problems can impact people’s lives, and entire communities, over many years.
Climate change compounds structural barriers. Disasters and the harshest extremes of day-to-day weather conditions most severely impact people who experience social and economic barriers to equality, and who are most often failed by our laws, policies, and justice systems. This includes people experiencing poverty, people living in regional and remote communities, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, for whom climate change can impact cultural and spiritual connections to land and waterways, as well as physical wellbeing.
Legal help for people impacted by climate disasters
Empowering communities to avoid legal problems
Community legal centres deliver community education on disaster-related legal issues to support people to prepare for disasters. This risk reduction education includes topics like housing and tenancy laws, social security, financial literacy, preparing important documents, and insurance. This kind of education helps to insulate communities from the ripple effects of disasters.
Supporting people to recover after a disaster
Need for community legal help skyrockets after a disaster. People need community legal centres to help them in areas like housing and tenancy, insurance, social security, domestic and family violence, child protection, and more. People need help immediately, as well as throughout the ‘long tail’ of the disaster, in the months and years following.
Community legal centres have been a critical part of disaster response following disasters like the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20, and unprecedented flooding disasters across NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland in 2021 and 2022 — just to name a few.
Many centres are in communities that have been hit by multiple disasters over the years. For example, Townsville Community Law has responded to monsoonal and flooding events in 1998, 2010-11, 2012 and 2019, and tropical cyclones in 1997, 2000, 2006 and 2011.
In many instances, community legal centres and staff are directly impacted by climate disasters, as well as contributing to response and recovery efforts.
This experience has taught us that communities value place-based services, from local organisations they already know and trust to be around long-term. People impacted by disasters benefit from the holistic, integrated, trauma-informed model we provide. Our support helps people manage the full range of legal and related needs impacting their lives during and following disasters.
Case studies
[quotes or stories from centres]
So, what are the solutions?
- bold action to combat climate change
- funding for resilience and risk reduction rolled into baseline
- improved processes for distributing response funding following a climate disaster that mean people who need help can get it when and where they need it