Biodiversity litigation in England and Wales: judicial review standards, scientific deference, weight to expert agencies, Aarhus costs protection, and the role of the Office for Environmental Protection

Published by a LexisNexis Environment expert

Practice notes

Background

The architecture of biodiversity law and policy is intricate. Spurred by pronounced post-war losses in biodiversity, a corpus of law has developed to confront the problem, though how effective it is remains unclear. The Introduction to Biodiversity Litigation (OUP, 2023) observes that, until lately, litigation has tended to centre on climate change before the judiciary or on the environment as a whole, rather than on biodiversity itself. However, biodiversity’s distinct features justify closer, subject-specific study within legal scholarship. Biodiversity law and policy have undoubtedly become embedded in governmental policy and rhetoric and in the jurisprudence of both domestic and international legal systems. This trajectory is set to persist, particularly as explicit links are increasingly drawn between restoring biodiversity and adapting to the effects of climate change. This Practice Note is designed to equip practitioners with the background and conceptual apparatus required when addressing biodiversity law. It focuses on the judiciary’s role in shaping biodiversity law and on the benchmarks and standards the courts apply to such cases. It illustrates these themes with examples from the increasingly large and expanding body of biodiversity litigation now available...

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Richard Broadbent

Freeths

Richard was a solicitor at Natural England since 2010 and was the Head of Legal Services since 2017. Richard then joined Freeths LLP in January 2022.Richard led on many of Natural England’s high-profile litigation and enforcement cases and provided advice to Natural England’s teams, for example, on the emergence of the Environment Act 2021 and Nature Recovery Green Paper.Richard is a highly distinguished environmental lawyer and has worked on a number of high-profile nationally significant infrastructure, planning, and species licencing cases. Richard trained at Collyer Bristow LLP in London and holds an LLM in Environmental Law from UCL....

Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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