Electricity systems between climate mitigation and climate adaptation pressures: can legal frameworks for resilience provide answers?

Resilience is the new buzzword in climate policy. Climate adaptation policies especially have increasingly adopted resilience as a lead term in relation to both man-made and natural environments. However, there has been little thinking about how the term would be interpreted in a legal context. The Victorian government has recently introduced legislation that expressly incorporates the term resilience. Not only does the Climate Change Act 2017 (Vic) contain a resilience-related objective, but also the Emergency Management Amendment (Critical Infrastructure Resilience) Act 2014 (Vic) is framed entirely around achieving critical infrastructure resilience. This new Act is the first attempt in Australia to expressly legislate for resilience. In our article, we explore how readily a policy objective of resilience can be translated into legal frameworks using the example of electricity infrastructure as critical infrastructure. The article shows that resilience could be a valuable bridging concept, able to support the transition to a decarbonised as well as climate-proof electricity system. However, this potential can only be realised once issues around scale and definition have been addressed. In addition, successfully translating resilience into law requires a careful examination of the broader legal context in which it is applied, otherwise it risks locking in unintended consequences, such as outdated ways of using and producing electricity.