Rethinking Plastics Pollution Post-Pandemic

Biography

Noreen O'Meara is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Human Rights, European and Environmental Law at Surrey Law School and holds a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship awarded in spring 2024. She read Law at the University of Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) and UCL (LLM (Public Law) and did her PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London. She has also completed non-degree studies at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Université Paris-1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and RADA. She previously worked as a research fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) and in practice at the European Commission's Legal Service and the Court of Justice of the European Union (cabinet, Advocate General Sharpston). Her work focused on infringement actions against Member States and cases in a broad range of areas of EU law, including data protection, taxation, extradition and environmental law.

At the University of Surrey, she has focused her research on European law and human rights, developing particular expertise on rights and the environment, environmental pollution and the evolution of human rights protection in Europe. She currently leads teaching in Law and Climate Change, exploring national, European and international legal and policy frameworks, and in European Human Rights Law, and directs the LLB Law and International Relations programme in collaboration with the Department of Politics. 

Noreen is Co-Director of the School of Law’s newest research centre, the Surrey Centre for International and Environmental Law (SCIEL) which launched in May 2020, and is a Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability. She leads and researches on a range of projects, several of which are hosted at the Governing Plastics Network, on the law and governance of plastics pollution and extended producer responsibility - funded by UKRI/GCRF, AHRC, ESRC/IAA, EPSRC, GIZ and the Danish EPA. Further recent interdisciplinary projects were funded by UGPN (focusing on plastics pollution during Covid-19) and the British Academy (exploring strategies for tackling fake news and online misinformation in the G7). She is also PI on four British Academy projects with collaborators across the EU exploring aspects of rights of nature, trade and urban sustainability. She also leads a project funded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) addressing global plastics and trade governance in the light of the negotiations for a UN Global Plastics Treaty, in collaboration with colleagues at Surrey, Exeter and Copenhagen. This project research provides recommendations supporting UNEP in their work advising states globally on effective regulation to mitigate the climate and health impacts of plastics pollution.

In 2018 and 2020, Noreen was a Sutherland Fellow (UCD), and previously held visiting positions at The Institute of European and Comparative Law (IECL, University of Oxford), iCourts (University of Copenhagen), University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, during which time she joined the Editorial Board of the Irish Journal of European Law (IJEL). She is also a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Stockholm University, a Research Affiliate at UCD Earth and an Affiliate researcher at the Exeter Centre for Environmental Law (ExCEL). In 2024-25, Noreen will hold the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to advance her research on national, EU and international dimensions of environmental governance.

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Biography

I am an environmental lawyer and I specialise in looking at the ways law can be used to protect the environment.  Recently I have been working on the 'wicked problem' of the polluting waste from plastics and how a circular economy might help to stop the problem of waste.  So I look at laws around the ecodesign of products and how they can be implemented to stop the production of waste and pollution.  I look at the whole governance frameworks for environmental law including not just the legislation but policy, implementation, enforcement and compliance as well as the impact of property rights. I have been working on the rights to water and sanitation and how they can be used to ensure a decent standard of living for people especially in developing countries.  I believe that we will not solve the problem of the degradation of the earth unless we work across disciplines seeking solutions together so I specialise in multidisciplinary research working with social and natural scientists and engineers.

I am the Director of the Environmental Regulatory Research Group (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/errg/) which is a research grouping of individuals and organisations engaged in research, teaching and consultancy into environmental regulation, compliance and enforcement and is part of the Surrey Centre for International and Environmental Law.

I am an associate member of the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey and I also practice as a barrister from Guildford Chambers.

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