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Dr Noah Walker-Crawford

Dr Noah Walker-Crawford

Affiliated Anthropologist

Department of Anthropology

Languages
English, German, Spanish
Key Expertise
Andes

About me

Noah is a publicly engaged researcher who studies climate litigation from a socio-legal perspective. He is a Research Fellow at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He leads the project ‘Bridging the evidentiary gap: climate attribution in the courtroom’ which examines how climate change attribution science shapes litigation. 

Noah holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. His doctoral research focussed on the moral dynamics of climate change: through an ethnographic study of climate justice claims between impacted communities, courts, and UN Climate Summits, he showed how legal activism reframes climate politics. He has held research fellowships in Political Science at University College London and at Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society. 

Beside his academic work, Noah advises litigants and NGOs on using legal tools to fight for climate justice. He helped initiate Luciano Lliuya v RWE, a groundbreaking lawsuit by a Peruvian farmer against a German energy company over its contribution to climate change impacts in the Andes and has played a key role in developing the evidentiary strategy.

Expertise Details

Andes; climate change; environment; legal anthropology; litigation; justice; evidence; knowledge

Selected publications

Walker-Crawford, N. (2023). Climate change in the courtroom: An anthropology of neighborly relations. Anthropological Theory, 21(1): 76-99.

Kodiveri, A., Walker-Crawford, N., Bals, C. & Khan, H. (2023). Policy Brief: The significance of climate litigation for the political debate on Loss & Damage. Bonn: Germanwatch.

Johansson, A., Calliari, E., Walker-Crawford, N., Hartz, F., McQuistan, C, and Vanhala, L. (2022) Evaluating progress on loss and damage: an assessment of the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism under the UNFCCC, Climate Policy, 22: 1199-1212.

Walker-Crawford, N. (2021) The Moral Climate of Melting Glaciers: Andean Claims for Justice at the Paris Climate Change Summit. In Sillitoe, P. (ed.) The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate: Ethnographic Contributions to the Climate Change Debate. New York & London: Berghahn.

Huggel C., Carey M., Emmer A., Frey, H., Walker-Crawford, N., Wallimann-Helmer, I. (2020) Anthropogenic climate change and glacier lake outburst flood risk: local and global drivers and responsibilities for the case of lake Palcacocha, Peru. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 20(8): 2175-2193.

Motschmann, A., Carey, M., Huggel, C., Moulton, H., Walker-Crawford, N., Muñoz, R. (2020) Loss & Damage in the mountain cryosphere: case study of the Cordillera Blanca, Peru. Climatic change, 162(2), pp. 837-858.