It is increasingly clear that lawyers—as lawyers—have a significant role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, adapting to climate change, and furthering sustainable development. As I have explained in a prior blog, both lawyers and lawyer organizations are necessary to this effort.
It is just as clear that lawyers cannot play that role effectively without a clear understanding of precisely what they should do in specific contexts. Indeed, the law profession is far behind its counterparts in such varied fields as civil engineering, architecture, finance, investment and accounting, supply chain management, and forestry in setting out sustainability and climate change standards for their work.
Over the last several decades, as Professor Kim Smith has written, U.S. law schools have greatly strengthened their climate change programs. But legal training on both climate change and sustainability tends to reach only those students who elect to take such courses. These issues tend not to be addressed in required courses. Thus, at many if not most U.S. law schools, it is highly likely that most students will graduate and practice law with little if any relevant training on climate change and sustainable development. .
And this is true notwithstanding the growing and increasingly obvious presence of these issues in nearly every single area of law practice. And it is also true in spite of the accelerating pace of climate change and unsustainable development.
The American Bar Association (ABA), the world’s largest voluntary association of lawyers, judges, and law students, has just taken two significant steps to address this gap in legal training. It has published a practice guide for lawyers on climate change and sustainability in real estate development. While based to some degree on U.S. law, it is focused more broadly on risks and opportunities that are almost certainly present in in any jurisdiction. Similarly, the ABA has created a resource page for legal educators that includes resources from many other countries.
These efforts grow out of, and are authorized by, two ABA House of Delegates resolutions. The first, adopted in 2019, urges lawyers “to advise their clients of the risks and opportunities that climate change provides.” The second, adopted in 2024, urges lawyers to “learn about sustainable development, and to counsel their clients on related risks and opportunities.” A growing number of lawyer organizations from every continent except Antarctica have adopted similar policies, as this International Bar Association registry shows.
To be sure, a great deal more needs to be done to bring the legal profession more in line with other fields of work. But these two steps illustrate the kind of contribution that bar associations and related lawyer organizations can make.
Practice Guide for Lawyers for Real Estate Development
This Guide is called Sustainability and Climate Change Risks and Opportunities In Real Estate Development: A Practice Guide for Lawyers. ABA’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources is making it available to anyone without charge here.
This practice area is exceptionally important for climate change and sustainable development. All human-made spaces, structures and surroundings that provide the setting for daily human activity are physical assets. As such, they are highly dependent on infrastructure and are uniquely vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate. Buildings also make a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (approximately one-third of such emissions globally).
This Guide presents good commercial practice for how attorneys should advise real estate stakeholders (professionals, investors, lenders, owners and occupants, insurance companies) on climate change and sustainability risks and opportunities in design, financing, construction, and sale or lease of new buildings as well as retrofits to existing buildings. Only 75 pages long, it provides practical strategies for identifying risk, uncovering opportunities, reducing costs, and structuring more resilient and sustainable real estate transactions.
It begins with a chapter on the evolving industry and professional standards of care, explaining that climate change in particular is changing what reasonable professional judgment for lawyers and other professionals means in specific contexts. The next three chapters are devoted to identifying risks and opportunities at the pre-development, construction, and post-development phases of a project. Then, two chapters explain how lawyers should advise different types of clients and how to advise clients in different types of transactions. A final chapter explains how to use climate-related contract clauses to address risks and opportunities, relying to a significant degree on the contract clause work of the Chancery Lane Project, a UK-based organization.
The Guide builds on a Practice Note on Climate Change and Property issued for solicitors in 2025 by the Law Society of England and Wales. Both the Practice Note and the Guide address three types of risks:
- Physical risks (e.g., flooding, wildfires);
- Transition risks (e.g., changes in laws and markets resulting from the transition to a more sustainable and climate-resilient built environment); and
- Liability and legal risks (e.g., deficiencies in due diligence and regulatory compliance).
The Guide also addresses opportunities (e.g., opportunities to improve project economics and long-term asset value).
Resource Page for Legal Educators
ABA’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources also has a new website, Sustainable Development Resources for Law School Educators, which compiles a great many articles and other resources. Anyone can access the site here, and can download the articles and other resources that are shown.
There does not appear to be a comparable resource page–anywhere.
Separate pages address integration of climate change and sustainable development into classes (with one page for individual doctrinal classes and another for clinical/experiential classes), integration into curricular requirements, and university-wide resources. Additional pages sort resources by jurisdiction, (e.g., US, Australia) and provide practice-oriented resources.
To encapsulate central ideas and issues, members of the ABA Task Force on Sustainability and Climate Change in Legal Education that produced the website have also written short essays on some of these topics, which can be found on the website. These resources, which can be found by clicking the “Learn More” tabs under their corresponding sections, are:
- Higher Education’s Response to the Polycrisis (Gregg Macey, Lewis & Clark College);
- Incorporating Sustainability into the Doctrinal Curriculum (Anna Mance, Sothern Methodist University Dedman School of Law);
- Incorporating Climate Change and Sustainability into Clinical Teaching (Abigail Fleming, University of Miami School of Law, and Erica Lyman, Lewis & Clark Law School); and
- Institutional Support for Incorporating Sustainability and Climate Change into the Law School Curriculum (Alice Kaswan, University of San Francisco School of Law, with contributions by Erica Lyman and Abigail Fleming).
Next Steps
For each of these efforts, much more remains to be done, including but not limited publicizing their availability. We expect practice guides on other legal topics may also be useful to practitioners. Bar association programming on the real estate practice guide and other guides is also essential.
For the resource page, it will be important to conduct and publish surveys of law professor efforts to integrate sustainability and climate change into specific classes, including but not limited to property, torts, and contracts. Textbook authors who find ways of incorporating climate change and sustainability into any text can also help. Teaching these topics across the law school curriculum tends to require heroic efforts by administrators, but it is being done at some law schools, particularly in Australia and New Zealand.
To be sure, stronger, more comprehensive, and more durable governmental and private sector efforts are also needed. But steps like those described here for lawyers and bar associations can also make an important contribution.
John C. Dernbach
Professor Emeritus, Widener University Commonwealth Law School. This article is written in his personal capacity, and nothing said here necessarily reflects the views of the ABA or any other organization.
