Joanna has a long standing interest in nature conservation, animal rights and law. She worked in the legal department at Friends of the Earth and as a solicitor at Leigh, Day & Co. in London, with a particular interest in environmental law multi-party actions. Joanna's ESRC funded PhD was on the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi Targets in the UK following which she completed an ESRC/SENNS funded post doctoral fellowship at Sussex University also with a focus on implementation of international biodiversity law. She has close affiliations with the 'Re-thinking Biodiversity Governance' network, an international think tank for transformative biodiversity governance. Her recent book: Implementing International Environmental Law and Policy: An Interactive Approach To Environmental Regulation (Routledge, 2024) focuses on transformative governance, she has also written on transformative governance of food production and consumption, tropical forests, invasive alien species and nature conservation. Her recent interests are on implementing legal and policy frameworks for the Rights of Nature in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and UK. She is lead of the University of Sussex/Envionmental Law Foundation: Environmental Justice Law Clinic (EJLC) where students under her supervision have undertaken: a comparative analysis of the Ecuadorian and Colombian rights of nature legal frameworks for an international law firm (2023); facilitated the Rights of the River Ouse workshop and symposium on implementation (2023, 2025), and have launched a Rights of Trees, Woodlands and Forests toolkit (2026). The EJLC are advising local communities on implementation of rights based approaches for trees and woodlands (as well as wild animal protection eg badgers, seals, nightingales). She has been awarded funding for the award winning transdisciplinary work on the rights of the Andean bear in Ecuador. She is also pursuing rights of nature research in global biodiversity governance with a focus on the Convention on Biological Diversity in collaboration with Southampton University and the Earth Law Centre.