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Environment and sustainability

Birmingham Law School research theme

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 Louis Dawson – l.j.p.dawson@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.
  • Soibi Bob-Manuel’s research is on energy law and justice, with particular emphasis on clean energy technology regulation and intellectual property (IP) rights.
  • Steven Cammiss’s most recent work focuses on the criminal trials of activists (and particularly environmental activists) and how this impacts on social movements.
  • 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.
  • Louis Dawson's research in environmental law encompasses abiotic and biotic media and includes, waste and resources, chemical regulation and biodiversity.
  • Angela Eggleton is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on the regulation of emerging technologies. As part of this, she researches environmental law and circularisation of the economy, with a focus on electric vehicles (EVs), and the regulation of EV li-ion batteries.
  • Laura Holden's research focuses on environmental law, ethical science, chemical safety, and the acceptance of novel science and technology.
  • Sandra Ingelkofer researches on renewable energy law and comparative law.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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.
  • Sean Madden’s (Theme Deputy Lead) research focuses on the impact of globalised industrial agricultural production on climate change, human rights, and food security, with particular regard to minority communities and women in the global south.
  • 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 research focuses on critical minerals, with a particular interest in how international trade and legal frameworks can support a circular economy and address environmental and human rights impacts in the 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.
  • Xinyue Xue is a Marie Curie Research Fellow. Her research focuses on sustainable public procurement and the empowerment of small businesses within public procurement markets.

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.

Justifying Protest in the Courts: Voice, Democracy, and the Law

Members: Dr Steven Cammiss

Funded by the British Academy, this project continues the work Dr Cammiss has conducted with Dr Graeme Hayes (Aston), Prof Brian Doherty (Keele) and Dr Joanna Gilmore (York) on the criminal trials of non-violent direct action activists. Drawing upon ethnographic observation of trials and interviews with activists, including those engaged in climate activism, the project seeks to develop our understanding of these trials as a contested space, and the trial’s relationship to deliberative democracy.

Met4Tech

Members: Professor Bob Lee, Professor Aleksandra Cavoski, Dr Jyoti Ahuja

As part of the UKRI-funded Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Technology Metals, Med4Tech utilises expertise from the natural and social sciences to maximise opportunities arising for sustainability in technology materials usage. The BLS researchers’ work focuses on the creation of regulatory and other legal structures necessary for the creation of a circular economy (Theme 3), whilst also providing legal oversight to all themes within the overall project.

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:

  • 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)
  • 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)
  • The promotion of small and medium enterprises in public procurement, from the perspective of sustainable development (Xinyue Xue)
  • 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)
  • Feeding a Humanitarian Disaster: International law, Global Industrial Agriculture, and the Dual Dichotomy (Sean Madden)

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.

The Multispecies Collective

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

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, Dr Louis Dawson

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.

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.