Scholar-Elect Naina Agrawal-Hardin's MPhil will focus on transnational climate change litigation, building on her early advocacy work
My research will inform the emerging field of transnational climate litigation and sharpen debates about the distribution of responsibility for today’s climate crisis.
Naina Agrawal-Hardin
Naina Agrawal-Hardin is interested in how climate change is being litigated around the world and in global reactions to climate change projections. Beginning this autumn, she will do an MPhil in the relatively new subject of Anthropocene Studies, with a focus on how climate change projections have historically been received by a wide range of actors, including governments, fossil fuel companies and the global public.
Her MPhil will trace the emergence of theories about spatially and socially differentiated climate risks. She aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that documents the history of climate change projections. She says: “My research will inform the emerging field of transnational climate litigation and sharpen debates about the distribution of responsibility for today’s climate crisis.”
Naina has long had a global lens on climate change, noticing how it affects seemingly disparate places in similar ways. She has observed personally the impact of flooding in rural East Tennessee, where her mother’s family has roots, and in North East India, where her father’s family are from. “Although Appalachia and Mithila are a world apart, witnessing climate disasters in both regions has shown me that poor and rural communities across the globe are not only least responsible for climate change, but also most vulnerable to its impacts,” she says.
Early years
Naina grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and was passionate about environmental issues from an early age. After learning about the consequences of palm oil extraction at the age of just eight, she decided to run an awareness campaign at school about sweets which contain palm oil. She then followed up with a coin drive to promote wildlife conservation. Her parents were always supportive of these efforts. In high school she became deeply involved in the global youth climate justice movement, helping to coordinate student strikes in her hometown and nationally as a member of the National Coordinating Committee.
Naina attended Washtenaw International High School, a public consortium high school in Ypsilanti, Michigan. They were very supportive of her climate justice work, for instance, allowing her to field media calls in the middle of the school day. “I’m so grateful to them,” she says. The school was very culturally diverse and had an international outlook, following the International Baccalaureate syllabus. Naina studied everything from the Arab Spring to decolonisation in Africa. “The teachers were fiercely committed to the school’s global mission,” she says.
Yale
When she graduated from high school Naina knew she would study the liberal arts, but she wasn’t sure until the end of her first year at Yale how climate and social movements would be part of her studies. She decided to major in history, with a focus on environmental history. While at university, after a short break from advocacy work, Naina became involved with Yale’s Endowment Justice Collective and with the Campus Climate Network, attending summits and meeting students from different parts of the world.
She also took part in research projects. In the summer of 2023, with support from Yale Law School, she worked with research teams at New York University Law School and the University of Oxford to study international climate change litigation. Naina became fascinated by innovative cases in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil and the UK. She has continued to work with NYU and Oxford since 2023.
In the summer of 2024, with support from Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, she conducted a research project on prospects for climate litigation in the Maldives. She travelled to the Maldives and learned about island ecologies and local environmental advocacy. She also interned at Earthjustice, a US non-profit law firm which specialises in environmental litigation, where she learned more about domestic climate cases.
Currently, she is working with colleagues at NYU on non-economic loss and damage, including losses related to cultural heritage, loss of identity, displacement, damage to biodiversity and impacts on human health and wellbeing and whether they can be compensated for legally.
Her research in the Maldives confirmed an interest in expanding her horizons globally. That interest and her desire to track advances in climate litigation in the UK and Europe more closely, formed part of her decision to apply for an MPhil in Anthropocene Studies in the UK.
Naina also liked how the Cambridge course was based in the Department of Geography, a new discipline for her. “It will mean I will learn a new way of thinking and, combined with my background in History, it will allow me to grow as a scholar,” she says.
