An early impetus for developing adaptive legal practice was to explore what our offer to clients should be in a volatile, uncertain world. 2026 has shown that offer needs to be more than navigating uncertainty — it must contribute to the stability and security we all need to thrive, whether as clients, colleagues, or organisations.
This was emphasised repeatedly at the National Emergency Briefing for Law in June. Taking food systems as one example, Professor Paul Behrens of the University of Oxford described how the era of stable harvests is over. Droughts, floods and heat extremes are rising. At 2°C of warming, the risk of several of the world’s major corn-growing regions failing in the same year jumps from a historic average of one year in sixteen to worse than one in two — disruption on a scale and frequency unknown to the Global North.
This is about more than people going hungry. When families cannot be fed, societal breakdown follows — a point echoed by national security expert Lieutenant General Richard Nugee. He identified food security as a pillar of national resilience: a bulwark against the individual and community vulnerabilities that organised crime and demagogues exploit. At a time when comparable instability elsewhere is straining the international rule of law, Lt Gen Nugee stressed that upholding the rule of law and social stability at home also deters hostile states from regarding the UK as a target — a useful reminder of our professional duty to uphold the rule of law, and of why that duty matters in practice.
Prof Behrens also set out the opportunities in meeting the food security challenge head on. His solution includes a transition to a predominantly plant-rich diet. This would cut farming emissions by around 60%, free up land for nature, carbon storage and flood resilience, improve air and water quality, and deliver healthier diets and NHS savings running into the billions. It would strengthen food security by letting us grow more of what we eat and rely less on imports — an approach Denmark has already begun.
What does this have to do with lawyers? First, realising these opportunities will demand legal support. Second, this is precisely the systemic viability risk I referenced in the previous article in this series. Clients active in the food sector, or financing it, give us the chance to help these benefits materialise — not only for them, but for all of us who would otherwise bear the long-term consequences of losing, in practice permanently, topsoil, pollinators, water aquifers and habitable land. Actively protecting this is the resilience Lt Gen Nugee is so keen for us to build.
This is where the comments at the Briefing from Ido Eisenberg of Quilter investment managers were particularly telling. He described the flawed incentives, models and assumptions that still treat the climate emergency as a marginal issue rather than a systemic threat. Given how much we hear about the importance of quality data to underpin evidence-based decisions, it’s striking that finance still relies on modelling suggesting a 3°C rise in global temperatures will reduce equity portfolio values by a mere 2% — the equivalent of a bad day on the stock market.
Eisenberg’s point, though, is that better modelling won’t be enough. Short-term incentives dominate finance, and systemically sound practices — pricing in the cost of externalities, treating systemic risk as financial risk, adopting long-term perspectives — will not be adopted voluntarily. Lawyers who advocate for reframing fiduciary duties, bring cases that shift precedent, and advise from a ‘transition now, not tomorrow’ perspective will be instrumental in delivering these adaptations — benefiting their immediate clients, their wider client portfolios, and the public interest, itself a core element of our professional duty.
Stability and security are not abstractions. They are the foundations businesses and investors need to succeed. Lawyers alert to systemic risk — and systemic viability risk in particular — are best placed to help deliver it.
David Hunter is senior counsel at Bates Wells