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Understanding and evaluating climate litigation impact
Supervisor: Avidan Kent (LAW)
Millie Prosser is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar at University of East Anglia as part of the Critical Decade programme. Her research focusses on understanding the efficacy of climate litigation as a tool to achieve significant mitigation commitments, and climate action, from states and businesses.
Millie has taken an unorthodox route into academia. Her experience is grounded in sustainability focussed land-based skills (e.g., food growing, coppicing, natural building), acquired at places such as at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales and Kinsale’s unique Permaculture course in Ireland. She went on to attend Cumbria University’s woodland ecology and forestry course before moving to Lancaster University to obtain her BSc in natural sciences, focussed on ecology, environmental science and climate change. Her dissertation, examining how Lancaster City Council could appropriately respond to its climate emergency declaration via valuing GHG emissions in decision-making, was awarded the best BSc dissertation in Lancaster Environment Centre (2020).
After graduating, she received funding from the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation at Lancaster University to complete her MSc by research. Building on previous work, she identified a simple spend-based method, with Blackpool Council, to support austerity constrained authorities’ indirect emissions accounting. She has campaigned and advocated for Paris-compliant climate emergency commitments at Lancaster City Council and University and co-founded Lancaster Youth For Environment (LYFE), to harness and amplify youth voices locally.
What are you most excited about in joining the Critical Decade PhD programme?
I am delighted to be joining a vibrant multi/inter-disciplinary team, where I’ll have access to impactful researchers in the Law School, Climate UEA and the Tyndall Centre, as well as the other Critical Decade scholars, all of which are focussed on vital, interlinking aspects of the climate problem. I think we have a unique and hopeful opportunity to examine and identify emergent solutions, carving out new research trajectories together to tackle the ‘wickedness’ of the climate problem, head on.
As scientists, we have done well at quantifying the size of the climate problem, but I am drawn to this programme for its focus on urgent, workable, societal responses and solutions. I believe this approach will allow us to better identify the barriers to action, how these can be addressed and what action is truly effective and why.
LinkedIn: Millie Prosser