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Environment and sustainability

Birmingham Law School research theme
An aerial shot of the alpine forests

We investigate how law can secure environmental justice - from environmental rights to intergenerational justice to multispecies flourishing - while turning research into real-world change.

Our work draws on diverse, interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and the humanities and social sciences to design legal solutions for interconnecting environmental and social challenges in the Anthropocene.

Our areas of expertise

Environmental justice, care and theory

Focus areas include critical legal theory, environmental ethics, rights, activism, social movements, and the impact on marginalised communities.

Contact: Dr Walters Nsoh – w.nsoh@bham.ac.uk.

Environmental conservation, preservation and natural resources

Focus areas include law regarding agriculture, animals, biodiversity, conservation, mining, waste, and the circular economy.

Contact: Dr Sean Madden – s.madden.1@bham.ac.uk.

Environmental risk, harm and regulation

Focus areas include chemicals, climate law, health, renewable energy, science and technology regulation, and war’s environmental impact.

Contact: Professor Aleksandra Cavoski – a.cavoski@bham.ac.uk. 

Environmental law, protection and other regimes

Focus areas include environmental law’s links with energy, EU, international, land, liability, planning, private and trade law.

Contact: Dr Henok Asmelash – h.b.asmelash@bham.ac.uk. 

Publications in the field

Academic staff working on environment and sustainability

  • Jyoti Ahuja's research examines the governance of green energy transitions and circular economy for critical materials. This includes legal approaches to managing risks from technology and scientific innovations.
  • Henok Asmelash's research focuses on legal and political issues at the intersection of trade, energy and the environment.
  • Kate Bedford's research focuses on law and international development, and gender and political economy.
  • Emily Carroll's research is to do with law and property; she is interested in exploring how land interacts with a wide spectrum of private and public law principles, including land law, equity, company and insolvency law, and planning law and policy.
  • Aleksandra Cavoski is a Professor of Law whose research interests are in the field of environmental law and EU law, including the intersection of law and other disciplines, in particular politics, science, public policy and language.
  • Janine Natalya Clark's research interests include war, transitional justice, posthumanism, new materialism, resilience and social-ecological systems.
  • Amber Dar's research focuses on regulation and responsibility for innovation in healthcare for children, and partnerships between health and law. The aims of partnerships between health and law include better identifying and addressing medical and non-medical factors impacting child health and well-being, such as environmental factors, housing and living conditions.
  • Laura Holden's research focuses on environmental law, ethical science, chemical safety, and the acceptance of novel science and technology.
  • Sandra Ingelkofer specialises in Environmental and Energy Law, as well as comparative administrative and constitutional law, with a particular interest in the interaction between legal frameworks, governance, and institutional reform.
  • Noah Izoukumor's research interests lie in environmental law, with a particular focus on the interplay between sustainable development and climate change regulation, energy transition policies, and oil and gas law.
  • Atina Krajewska's research interests focus on global health law, especially sexual and reproductive justice, women’s rights, and the sociology of law. She is increasingly interested in the relationship between land and health rights.
  • Bob Lee researches on technology regulation looking at net zero transitions and also at chemical safety.
  • Sean Madden's research sits at the confluence of international human rights and environmental law, with particular interest in globalised industrial agriculture, climate breakdown, and food security.
  • Walters Nsoh's research focuses primarily on the intersection of property (land) law and environmental law as it relates to the governance and sustainable management of natural resources/ecosystem goods and services.
  • Iyan Offor (Theme Lead) conducts socio-legal and theoretical research on animals, nature and society, focusing on global animal law, global environmental law, critical legal theory, posthumanism, queer theory, intersectionality, and law & literature.
  • Synda Obaji specialises in Environmental and Energy Law. Her research focusses on understanding complex legal and regulatory issues relating to environmental and energy justice, environmental governance, and sustainability. It explores the substantive and procedural foundations of environmental problems.
  • Shalpreet Singh's research examines the effectiveness of environmental impact assessments in tackling climate change and meeting sustainability goals along with environmental law’s intersection with land law.
  • Clare William's research sits at the intersection of law, economy and society, and takes critical and socio-legal approaches to understanding law's role in resource allocation, distribution and protection, as well as the resulting inequalities.

Doctoral researchers working on environment and sustainability

  • Abiola Awe-Adesanya's multidisciplinary research explores the environmental and sustainability challenges in the shift to electric vehicles, with a focus on recycling and reusing, towards a circular economy.
  • Ursula Clarke's research interests concern regulating point of sale sustainability disclosure to improve sustainable consumption and circularity.
  • Kexuan Ding's research interests are in the field of public international law and environmental law. She is currently exploring how international organizations, such as the UNHCR and IOM, have influenced the development of legal and policy frameworks for the protection of climate refugees.
  • Mo Esan's research focuses on global animal law and public international law, investigating the text, history and implementation of the African Union’s Animal Welfare Strategy for Africa.
  • Bethan Smith's research focuses on the roles of law, environmental ethics, and culture in addressing marine animal and environmental issues.
  • Rubina Sultan-Chaudhary's (Theme Deputy Lead) research examines the governance of critical minerals, with a particular focus on the shift from free trade to protectionist policies and its implications for the global energy transition.
  • Ke Tang's research centres on biodiversity law, with particular emphasis on biodiversity conservation, the equitable governance of global genetic-resource flows, and the regulation of biotechnology. His work also explores the intersections of environmental law with both property and tort law.
  • Deborah Weinrauch's doctoral research is in animal law while her other work includes environmental law (in particular, oil and gas hazards and the impact on animals).

Our research on environment and sustainability

Projects

Research projects

Global Animal Law from the Margins

Members: Dr Iyan Offor

This project critically engages the emerging field of global animal law from the perspective of an intersectional ethical framework. Reconceptualising global animal law, this project’s research outcomes argue that global animal law overrepresents views from the West as it does not sufficiently engage views from the Global South, as well as from Indigenous and other marginalised communities. Tracing this imbalance to the early development of animal law’s reaction to issues of international trade, the project elicits the anthropocentrism and colonialism that underpin this bias. In response, the project outlines a new, intersectional second wave of animal ethics. Incorporating marginalised viewpoints, it elevates the field beyond the dominant concern with animal welfare and rights. And, drawing on aspects of decolonial thought, earth jurisprudence, intersectionality theory and posthumanism, it offers a fundamental rethinking of the very basis of global animal law. The project’s critical, yet practical, new approach to global animal law is communicated to animal law and environmental law experts, legal theorists, and those working in the areas of animal studies and ecology.

PrecisionTox

Members: Professor Bob Lee, Professor Aleksandra Cavoski, Dr Laura Holden

The project looks at understanding the potential human and environmental harm from chemicals, whether that be those in detergents, fragrances, plastics, agriculture, or others. Typically, toxicology testing uses animal studies, but PrecisionTox is developing a novel approach to chemical risk assessment using non-sentient organisms (like fruit flies and water fleas) and looking at the genes they share with humans. On this project, staff from Birmingham Law School have researched the sociotechnical barriers to the uptake of such novel approaches across a range of stakeholders and jurisdictions and solutions to overcome these barriers. They have subsequently undertaken a review of regulatory capacity to accept such alternatives, alongside case law analysis.

RECREATE (REcycling CRitical Elements in Advanced Technologies for the Environment)

Members: Professor Bob Lee

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the project brings together leading industrial and public-sector players and policymakers with researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Leicester and Edinburgh to develop a circular economy for technology critical metals (TCM), keeping the materials or components in the highest value form with the lowest environmental footprint.

Solarpunk and Multispecies Worlding

Members: Dr Iyan Offor

This project is building creative methodologies to reimagine law and advocate for legal reform in response to interconnected harms to animals, nature, and marginalised humans that law has failed to resolve. Three types of proposed creative methods (narrative, storytelling, ethical discourse) will be built by engaging the hopeful, ecological, justice-oriented norms embedded in solarpunk literature (and aligned theory). The proposed creative methods will emphasise queer, multispecies theory and practice. Three communities (change-makers, future-oriented creatives, and researchers) will be engaged as collaborators and users in this research project through: interviews, blog forum discussions, and worlding workshops.

Transqueer Ecological Justice

Members: Dr Iyan Offor

This project seeks to explore how transqueer ecological justice may inform responses to our multispecies planetary crisis in which climate crisis, biodiversity loss, pollution and other forms of environmental degradation have become commonplace. This project responds to the onto-epistemologically anthropocentric, colonial, gendered, ableist and capitalist foundations of legal responses to multispecies planetary crisis. It does so by applying trans and queer theories of the more-than-human to foster points of solidarity between the more-than and less-than human. This project is led in partnership with Dr Emily Jones (Newcastle University) and Dr Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews).

Upstream

Members: Professor Bob Lee

A Horizon Europe Innovation Action project that aims to improve the cleanliness and water quality of European rivers that flow through several major European capitals and into five sea basins.

Doctoral research projects

This research theme hosts various PhD projects led and supervised by our members. These include the following.

Current:

  • Achieving Marine Biodiversity Conservation in the Nordic Region: Biocentrism as a Solution to Protecting Cultural Identity and Illegalising Marine Hunts (Bethan Smith)
  • A Qualitative Study of the Intersection of Animal Cruelty and Neglect Prosecution, Speciesism, and Animal Sentience in California, Connecticut, and Iowa (Deborah Weinrauch)
  • Fostering a circular economy through the closure of the sustainability information gap between producer and consumer. A rare-earth magnet case-study (Ursula Clarke)
  • From Neoliberalism to Protectionism: Governing Critical Minerals and Circular Economy Ambitions in the Energy Transition (Rubina Sultan-Chaudhary)
  • How International Organizations, such as the UNHCR and IOM, Influence the Development of Legal and Policy Frameworks for the Protection of Climate Refugees (Kexuan Ding)
  • Investigating the History, Text and Implementation of the Animal Welfare Strategy for Africa through the lens of Third World Approaches to International Law (Mo Esan)
  • Living in a material world: Critical Materials and the Shift to Electric Vehicles – A Legal Analysis (Abiola Awe-Adesanya)

Former:

  • Feeding a Humanitarian Disaster: International law, Global Industrial Agriculture, and the Dual Dichotomy (Sean Madden, 2026)
  • The promotion of small and medium enterprises in public procurement, from the perspective of sustainable development (Xinyue Xue, 2025)
  • Energy justice and multilevel perspective impact assessment of energy access and transition in Nigeria: a mini-grid case study (Love Alfred, 2024)
  • Extended producer responsibility and its role in facilitating a circular economy in the European Union: an analysis of four directives (Louis Dawson, 2024)
  • Making limits matter: examining decision-making on shale gas development in relation to environmental impact (Naomi Luhde-Thompson, 2023)
  • Towards fishery sustainability in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation : a critical analysis of effectiveness of international legal regimes (I-Ju Chen, 2020)
  • Evaluating environmental justice in Nigeria : procedural justice in the environmental impact assessment process (Synda Obaji, 2020)
  • The role of informed consent in the veterinary clinic : a case study in companion animal neutering (Ann Gray Carol, 2019)
  • Environmental taxation as a form of environmental protection : exploring the carbon reduction commitment (Amy Lawton, 2018)
  • Environmental Impact Assessment: Towards the concept of Sustainable Development (Bridget Anthonio-Apedzi, 2019)
  • Reimagining the future of geothermal energy regulation in Indonesia: Lesson learned from oil legal framework (Indra Wahyuni, 2002)

Communities

This research theme is a research community that facilitates and/or hosts multi-institutional and multi-sector networks and spin-off collaborations. These include the following:

Birmingham Plastics Network

Members: Professor Bob Lee, Professor Aleksandra Cavoski, Dr Walters Nsoh

A university-wide interdisciplinary community of researchers working on issues related to plastic waste and sustainability, and theorising a whole-system approach to plastic consumption encompassing economic, environmental, and social factors.

Multispecies Collective

Theme members: Dr Iyan Offor (lead), Mo Esan, Sean Madden

The Multispecies Collective is a collaborative group of researchers working together with practitioners to create knowledge, theory and practice for positive change toward futures of flourishing for animals, nature and society.

NAMWISE

Theme members: Dr Laura Holden, Professor Aleksandra Cavoski

NAMWISE project aims to drive the adoption and integration of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) for the assessment of the safety and efficacy of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. By providing a comprehensive set of recommendations, guidance, and training resources, NAMWISE seeks to validate and implement NAMs effectively.

PARC

Theme members: Dr Laura Holden, Professor Aleksandra Cavoski, Professor Bob Lee

PARC is a Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals which aims to develop next-generation chemical risk assessment to protect human health and the environment.

PrecisionTox

Theme members: Dr Laura Holden, Professor Aleksandra Cavoksi, Professor Bob Lee

PrecisionTox proposes ‘precision toxicology’, a novel scientific approach establishing causation between chemicals and their adverse health effects.

Centre for Environmental Research and Justice (CERJ)

Theme members: Professor Aleksandra Cavoski, Professor Bob Lee, Dr Laura Holden, Dr Syna Objaji, Dr Iyan Offor, Rubina Sultan-Chaudhary

CERJ unites experts from many disciplines to address the escalating global issue of environmental pollution.

Get involved

News

  • Learn about our latest research and events through our updates on LinkedIn.

Activities

BLS Environment & Sustainability Research Gathering

The central meeting place for our research theme members to discuss their ongoing research work, seek feedback, build collaborative projects, and connect.

Get involved! Members of our BLS community working on environment and sustainability are welcome to join our research theme and will receive invites to all internal events. If you would like to join our community, learn about our visiting researcher programme, doctoral programmes, taught degrees, and vacancies.

BLS Environment & Sustainability Research Discussions

Our regular event series in which we feature leading research on environment and sustainability from our members, collaborators and members of our network.

Get involved! If you would like to join our events to discuss some of the most pressing issues impacting upon the environment and sustainability today, email i.offor@bham.ac.uk to be added to our mailing list.

If you would like to get involved with the Environment & Sustainability Research Theme, contact the theme lead, Dr Iyan Offor, at i.offor@bham.ac.uk.