Reforming restoration law to support climate change adaptation

This chapter takes the emerging concept of ‘renewal ecology’ as a lens through which to analyse whether restoration laws and policies can enhance conservation in a period of rapid, anthropogenic environmental change. Renewal ecology emphasises the need to take adaptation-oriented approaches to restoring ecological health and function. While continuing to emphasise the importance of conserving the natural world, renewal ecology accommodates concepts of ecological novelty, and accepting a potential role for humans as well as non-human ‘novel’ species and interactions, in the task of renewing landscape-scale ecological functions. This chapter demonstrates that Australia’s legal frameworks for restoration, by contrast, are typically reactive, focused on a stationary and simplistic view of nature that assumes that harm can be ‘undone’ over relatively short timeframes. The chapter argues that the concept of ‘renewal’ provides a useful way to reconceive of the task of restoration. In particular, the concept of renewal has the potential to support new legal mechanisms for helping biodiversity to thrive, despite the dramatic challenge that climate change represents to life on Earth.