The Multispecies Collective, founded by Dr Iyan Offor, is imagining new legal frameworks that recognise the value of non-human flourishing.
It is clear to even the most casual of observers that the responses of governments and lawmakers to climate change is inadequate. We are not meeting the scale and pace of this global, intergenerational and existential threat with adequate action. One reason for this is a failure of imagination. Another is our failure to think beyond human beings.
COP30 — the 30th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — provides an annual spectacle of such insufficient and human-centred policy-making. The world watches with alarm as various nations’ leaders struggle to agree to obligations that would barely hold us to an average global temperature rise that, if achieved, would just barely skirt climate catastrophe. The impact of climate change on communities across the globe is already being felt, breaching basic human rights and causing particular detriment to already vulnerable or marginalised communities.
This failure of human rights is gaining increasing attention following a 2022 UN General Assembly resolution and a 2025 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. These recognise the existence of a human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and articulate obligations of states in respect of climate change as a result. While such advances may inspire more effective action against climate change, this human-rights based approach is being critiqued by many researchers as a missed opportunity to think about our natural environment and non-human animals in their own right.
Researchers have been advocating for a reimagining of environmental law in response to environmental emergencies for some time. This follows a growing trend toward the recognition of rights of nature and animal rights in law. Such advances have been based on arguments that nature and non-human animals have intrinsic value in their own right and, as a result, are deserving of the freedom to flourish and protection from harm. It is often argued that this requires that legal systems shift from treating non-human animals and nature as property and, instead, regard them as legal persons with legal rights. While such legal reform has occurred in states across the globe — and an international court recognised the rights of nature for the first time this year — the climate change COPs have not yet taken the opportunity to incorporate such multispecies thinking.
University of Birmingham researcher Dr Iyan Offor has founded The Multispecies Collective to create a research environment in which the value and flourishing of non-human animals and nature are taken seriously in work toward legal, political and societal change. The collective is a collaborative group of researchers working together with change-makers and future-oriented creatives to create knowledge, theory and practice for positive change toward futures of flourishing for animals, nature and society. The collective forwards multispecies thinking that could transform the foundations of climate change law and policy by recognising that humans exist as part of nature and that the rest of nature has perspectives and concerns that ought to be recognised. In this way, multispecies research investigates the knowledge and experience of non-human life to better understand, for example, how lawmaking can appropriately respond. This requires focusing on ecological frameworks and the relationships between different beings in ecosystems rather than focusing solely on, for example, individual human rights.
The Multispecies Collective pursues multispecies thinking not just as a morally-defensible foundation for research but also as a potential framework for more effective responses to issues like climate change. The collective’s research has reached various recommendations in this regard which include:
Assistant Professor in Environmental Law and Sustainable Development
Biographical and contract information for Iyan Offor, Assistant Professor at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham.
