New legal and governance solutions could improve the effective and fair application of environmental law and environmental rights, with special attention to the fast-growing reality of cities (or urban environments). At first glance, environmental legal systems characterised by more flexible or adaptive instruments could appear not to be so effective as desired. However, the experience presented in this study, and in existence (even if not totally integrated) in a large number of legal systems, demonstrates the opposite. In fact, the inclusion of evolving environmental legal mechanisms responds to the needs of resilience of social-ecological systems in a more coherent, inclusive, and participatory way, preventing a number of agents who could not comply with environmental norms and principles from doing it when the law is more adaptive. Environmental adaptive law is only a part of the solution. International, regional, federal, national or state hard-law instruments and the rights enshrined by them must still play an extremely important role, as guiding legal conditions for the subsequent collaborative implementation of a more social-ecological resilient future in current uncertain cities (and in the rest of other territories), from all and for all. Not only public authorities, but also members of local communities can thus play an extremely relevant role in all these relations between various levels of law and governance. The application of procedural environmental rights, such as those to information and transparency, enhancing public consultations, participation in decision-making and in the drafting of local and national laws, is an example of what the future of environmental law may resemble. By empowering, engaging and involving citizens and different entities, and embracing multimodal and multi-stakeholder approaches, closer to local realities and environmental problems will be possible to better prepare social-ecological urban systems for uncertainty and future disturbances.