Talk Justice, an LSC Podcast: Legal Services for Climate Emergencies
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Carl Rauscher
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WASHINGTON–Legal experts discuss the access-to-justice implications of the increasing number of climate emergencies and the role of legal aid and pro bono attorneys in the latest episode of LSC's “Talk Justice” podcast, released today. Jason Tashea, a member of LSC’s Emerging Leaders Council, hosts the conversation with guests Jeanne Ortiz-Ortiz, pro bono and strategic initiatives manager at Pro Bono Net; Linda Anderson Stanley, senior manager for disaster resilience programming at Equal Justice Works; and Ariadna Godreau Aubert, founder and executive director of Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico.
“We're talking about the impact on historically vulnerable populations when we're talking about sea-level rise, or we're talking about major hurricanes or flooding or fires,” says Godreau-Aubert. “We're talking not only about disparate impact, but we're also talking about how policies that have to do with recovery [and] how legal processes that have to do with assistance impact their lives.”
Anderson Stanley says that as extreme weather events increase in areas that aren't prepared for them, like winter storms in Texas or extraordinary heatwaves across the nation, infrastructure isn’t prepared to respond.
“In California they do things like the Utility Public Safety Power Shutoffs, but they're not thinking about the folks with disabilities who rely on electricity for oxygen, for example,” Anderson Stanley says. “So attorneys are working to ensure that the disaster recovery methods that are in place are equitably accessible for everybody, and lawyers can help make the government [recognize] the importance of that proper infrastructure.”
Attorneys’ roles in extreme weather are quite complicated—from triaging urgent disaster response, to advocating for equitable infrastructure, and even to executing “managed retreat” as some regions become less and less livable. The difficult reality is that the spotlight on one community’s climate disaster fades as soon as the next one takes place, making leveraging robust and sustainable responses a challenge.
“I think that it’s also important to be able to understand that even when years [have] passed, there's people that are going to be left behind and that five years after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, there’s people still in the same position with the same blue tarp that they had in 2017,” says Godreau Aubert.
“So while we're speaking about the future and resiliency, mitigation and whatnot, what are we going to do with those people that are still expecting dignified housing or are displaced from the place they used to call home?”
Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple and other popular podcast apps. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.
The next episode of the podcast will explore how Georgetown University’s academic medical-legal partnership is providing a model for training the next generation of health, law, and policy leaders.