Global climate change means that lawyers need to be aware of how tougher laws to protect the environment could affect justice, says Sara Parkin


The UK strategy for sustainable development calls on professionals to become 'sustainability literate' - that is, to understand enough about the importance of a healthy environment to a flourishing society and to practise any profession accordingly. Some bodies have included sustainability literacy in their registration standards. Lawyers should urgently do the same.



Former US Vice-president Al Gore's film, 'An Inconvenient Truth', has just opened in the UK. An important reason for the film's success is its timing. It is being screened during the year governments (including the US) are taking seriously the evidence of damage to the climate and other global ecological systems that maintain life. Most people in Britain now understand this and agree we have to tackle climate change, according to a recent Mori poll.



Lawyers are just as interested in their own future, and that of their children or grandchildren, as anybody else, but are maybe equally confused about the right thing to do at home or at work. Advice from government and campaigning charities can be bewildering or even contradictory.



This confusion and the likelihood that policy will move quickly, means lawyers need to be ready to implement laws or reinterpret existing ones. It will not be easy to get the balance right between protecting the environment and maintaining freedoms and justice. Gordon Brown describes doing just that while ensuring prosperity as being the 'new synthesis' that governments and the rest of us will have to achieve.



Awareness is growing about how the irresponsible actions of others can affect us all. Households consume a quarter of the energy used in the UK and emit a fifth of climate-change gases, so how soon will it be before energy profligacy by a neighbour is interpreted as an infringement of the right to a healthy environment? Or for a drought-plagued local council to be considered negligent for failing to improve the porosity of road surfaces, allowing precious rain to drain into sewers rather than soak into aquifers?



Public expectations are well informed and likely to outstrip the pace of new or re-regulation. Anything less than best practice, even if greater than legal compliance, could be seen as unreasonable behaviour, whether perpetuated by individuals, the government, or the private sector. Leading companies are already preparing for a future where environmental and social responsibility is as material to business success as is financial performance.



Like other professions, lawyers subscribe to standards of professional conduct that include a duty to consider the whole predicament of a client in the context of the wider public good. That means environmental, social and financial consequences of advice and decisions can no longer be taken separately - whatever branch of law is being practised.



Other professions, ranging from marketing to architecture, are at varying stages of integrating sustainability competencies into their standards. Forum for the Future is currently running a project with professions to support them as they do this. The UK engineers did it in 2003, with consequent influence on universities and quality assurance bodies, professional development courses, and employer training programmes. Lawyers need to be doing the same.



Frankly, the rest of us will struggle if the legal profession is not up to speed.



Sara Parkin is the founder director of Forum for the Future