Conveyancers and climate risk: the duty of care in NSW property transactions

The duty of care behind a property certificate

The foundational case is Shaddock & Associates v Parramatta City Council (1981). A council issued a certificate that failed to mention a road-widening proposal affecting the land. The High Court held that a body which supplies information others are expected to rely on can owe a duty of care, and can be liable where a negligent omission causes loss. The principle is not limited to councils: it runs to anyone in the transaction whose information a client relies on.

For a conveyancer or solicitor, the duty to the client already exists in contract and in tort. What is moving is its scope — the set of risks a reasonable practitioner is expected to have in view. As hazard data that was once specialist becomes public and searchable, the line between “not our job” and “a foreseeable matter we passed over” shifts with it. None of this makes a conveyancer a climate scientist. It does raise the question of whether a knowable, mapped hazard was surfaced, or quietly left for the buyer to discover after exchange.

Where the standard searches stop

The s10.7 planning certificate is a point-in-time yes/no instrument. It flags whether flood-related development controls or bushfire-prone land apply. It does not tell a buyer how deep a flood reaches, how often, what it costs to insure, or how the exposure changes over a 30-year mortgage. It says nothing about forward-looking climate projections, and it does not cover estuarine tidal inundation, which the NSW Government only published as a state-wide mapped dataset in late 2025. The table above sets out the gap matter by matter.

The gap is not a defect in the certificate — it was never designed to carry that detail. It is simply the space a buyer (and the practitioner advising them) now has to fill from other sources. See also the s10.7 flood data gap.

The direction of travel: disclosure is widening

NSW has not legislated a vendor climate-disclosure duty, and this article does not suggest it has. But the surrounding movement is one way. Queensland introduced a mandatory seller disclosure regime. Victoria treats a history of flooding or bushfire as a material fact a vendor must disclose. At the corporate level, Australia's mandatory climate-disclosure standard now requires large entities to assess physical climate risk to their assets — a signal of where public expectation is heading, even though it does not bind a residential transaction.

The practical read for a NSW practitioner is not “a new rule applies tomorrow.” It is that buyer expectation and the standard of a careful search are drifting toward fuller hazard transparency, and the data to meet that expectation is increasingly free and per-address. See how the states compare on seller disclosure.

What careful practice looks like now

None of the following is legal advice, and none of it turns a conveyancer into a hazard consultant. It is simply what surfacing a foreseeable, knowable risk tends to involve:

• Surface the mapped hazards that public data already shows — flood and bushfire — rather than leaving them at a bare yes/no.
• Where government climate projection data exists for the location, note it as cited, dated context — not as a score or a verdict, which can mislead.
• Prompt the insurance question before exchange, since hazard exposure and premium cost are what actually move a buyer's decision.
• Record that these matters were put in front of the client. A short note that a hazard was raised is the difference between a matter disclosed and a matter passed over.

A single consolidated disclosure that gathers the mapped hazards and the cited climate context into one document is one way to do this consistently across a matter list — so completeness does not depend on remembering to run a separate search each time.