Dr Noah Walker-Crawford and Zaneta Sedilekova

Catch Noah and Zaneta on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick and Dan Kieran 19th - 25th October 2026.

Dr Noah Walker-Crawford, Research Fellow at LSE and Imperial College London, and Zaneta Sedilekova, Sustainability Risk Lawyer and Director of Planet Law Lab

Dr Noah Walker-Crawford is an anthropologist and Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Imperial College London, whose work asks what happens when the law is used as a tool for climate justice. His path ran through the Peruvian Andes, where he lived and did his PhD fieldwork. There he watched glaciers retreat, springs dry up and new pests climb to altitudes they had never reached. He also learned that for many Andean communities the mountains are not piles of rock but powerful beings who are now suffering. In 2014, working with the German NGO Germanwatch, he met Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a farmer from Huaraz whose valley sits beneath a swelling glacial lake. That meeting began a ten-year legal journey against the German energy giant RWE. Its argument was strikingly simple: in times of climate change, we are all neighbours. Noah tells the inside story in his book, The Climate Trial.

Zaneta Sedilekova is a sustainability risk lawyer, director of Planet Law Lab and one of The Lawyer's Hot 100 for 2025. She is also a self-confessed "law nerd" who came to the law through history rather than ambition. As an eighteen-year-old student in Slovakia, she was asked to present on the legislation that enabled the Holocaust. She found herself staring at an ordinary piece of paper that had legalised mass murder, and it left her with a question that has shaped her career: what is wrong with law? After years advising corporate clients on climate litigation risk, she now works independently on climate, nature and social risk, helping boards and managers prepare for the long-term risks they are least equipped to see. She has just begun a PhD at the University of Glasgow exploring how law might be derived from ecological principles, and what would change if contracts promised legal adaptability rather than legal certainty.

Together they make the case that climate litigation is a response to political failure. It moves slowly and costs a great deal, and it should never have been necessary. It can still shift precedent, markets and minds. The RWE case asked for just 0.5% of the cost of a protective dam, around €20,000. It ended with a German court accepting, for the first time anywhere, that a major emitter can in principle be held liable for climate harm on the other side of the world.

In conversation with Dan and Mike, Noah and Zaneta take in German judges hearing glaciers crack in the high Andes and Saúl's words on the courthouse steps: "the lakes are the tears of the mountains." They also discuss boardrooms, grief and the fears of young people, and why the law, which tends over time towards greater inclusion, may yet find room for mountains, rivers and trees.