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This chapter describes the structural roles that law plays to facilitate adaptation to climate disasters, as well as the features of adaptive legal systems. Climate disasters highlight the need for legal systems to help human communities and environmental systems to adapt to climate change and climate disasters. However, adaptation won’t be possible unless legal systems themselves are adaptive. The chapter discusses four changes that would make legal systems more adaptive: greater flexibility; use of law for transformation; a revolutionary evolution in the law; and an intentional focus on justice, including climate justice, disaster justice, and most especially resilience justice.

Climate change impacts on agriculture are diverse and potentially disastrous for global food security. This chapter analyzes the main issues law and policymakers at the international and the domestic level should focus on when developing a legal framework that is sufficiently equipped to deal with climate disasters affecting agriculture. Three stages are distinguished: disaster mitigation, in which focus should be on adoption and implementation of climate-smart practices and technologies; disaster response, mainly aimed at food supply; compensation and rebuilding, aimed at creating a more resilient agricultural sector that is better suited to deal with the next climate disaster.

This chapter examines the most important existing regulatory and policy measures to improve the resiliency and adaptive capacity of all types of residential and commercial buildings, both new and existing. It considers how buildings should be modified to cope with climate-related extreme events. Building codes and other legal requirements often lag seriously behind the need to revise them, and most builders do not go beyond what the codes require. Climate projections involve a wide uncertainty range, and protection against the worst case scenarios may be beyond the economic capacity of all but a few owners. Particular attention is paid to slums, and to provisional and post-disaster housing.

The effects of climate change are already being felt in financial markets. The role of the pension fund trustee is to mediate between its members’ interests and the opportunities and risks emerging in those markets. This chapter provides a nuanced and contextualised account of the legal and regulatory framework in which Australian pension funds, in particular, navigate this complex, contested, and uncertain environment.