Sophie is an MU Sustainability/ Geography expert, with extensive knowledge on marine environments and seascape ecology, her specialism in her current job as a research assistant in the Oxford University Seascape Ecology Lab. Sophie has contributed to three recent academic papers about the Seychelles, Blue Carbon, and the Arctic and worked with a range of academics with specialisms from Maritime Law to International Climate Policy. Find out about her exciting research on the growing interest in marine ecology to include indigenous knowledge in conservation efforts.

Under almost any given country’s legal system, its citizens – its people – have rights: to exist freely, to be free from exploitation, to be safe from harm enacted by another. The same is not true, however, of the natural world. The Amazon rainforest is felled at an astonishing rate, the Great Barrier Reef suffers massive bleaching on a regular basis, and countless other small acts of pollution and degradation occur the world over, every minute of every day. But what if these wonders of the natural world could be protected in the same way? What if a river, or a forest, or a whole ecosystem could become a person?