Two appointments and two re-appointments to the OEP Board
Professor Elizabeth Fisher and Caroline May have been appointed as Non-Executive Directors of the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), and Professor Dan Laffoley and Dr Paul Leinster CBE have been reappointed for second terms.
Elizabeth Fisher's and Caroline May's new roles will run from 1 July 2025 until 30 June 2029. Dan Laffoley's and Paul Leinster's second terms will run from 1 July 2025 to 31 December 2026.
The appointments have been made in accordance with the Ministerial Governance Code on Public Appointments published by the Cabinet Office. All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process.
The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) was created in November 2021 under the Environment Act. It is an independent statutory body with a remit to protect and improve the environment by holding government and other public authorities to account in England and Northern Ireland.
Biographies
Professor Elizabeth Fisher
Professor Elizabeth Fisher is Professor of Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford.
She has over three decades of experience as an environmental law academic and writes widely on environmental law and administrative law in national common law jurisdictions.
She was General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law from 2012 to 2022 and from 2022 to 2025 she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project exploring legal imagination and environmental law.
She is a Delegate of Oxford University Press and has served as Vice Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty. She is also an Overseas Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and has been a Member of the OEP's Advisory Group on Environmental Principles since 2023.
Caroline May
Caroline May has been a specialist environmental lawyer for over 35 years. She is currently head of the environment, ESG and safety practice for Europe, Middle East and Asia at global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, where she has been a partner since 2006.
She is Chair of the Law Society Climate Change Committee which produced the world's first professional services guidance on climate change.
She is Honorary President of the Legal Sustainability Alliance and a former Director of leading sustainability NGO, the Aldersgate Group. She sat on the National Council of the United Kingdom Environmental Law Association (UKELA) for 6 years.
She is a Freeman of the City of London and is listed in the Ends Power List 2024, as a Green Ambassador for the UK by Legal 500, and in the Guide to the World's Leading Environmental Lawyers.
Professor Dan Laffoley
Professor Dan Laffoley is a scientist, communicator, explorer and marine biologist, with over four decades of experience in the UK, Europe and around the world. He is a UK and international expert on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and conservation.
He is Emeritus Marine Vice Chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Commission on Protected Areas responsible for global targets and guidance on ocean protection.
Prior to that he led the development and scale-up of the marine conservation work of Natural England and English Nature. He has been responsible for the creation of many global, European and UK public and private sector partnerships, alliances and frameworks that underpin modern-day marine conservation.
This work includes creating the concept behind Blue Carbon, scaling up knowledge and action on ocean warming, acidification and deoxygenation, scaling-up work on marine World Heritage and conservation of the High Seas, and various global guidance on implementing MPAs and marine spatial planning.
Dr Paul Leinster CBE
Dr Paul Leinster CBE has over 40 years of practical experience in environmental management, science, policy and regulatory development and implementation in the private and public sectors.
He is Chair of Water Resources East, the Cambridge Water Scarcity Group, the Bedfordshire Local Nature Partnership, the Great Ouse Rivers Trust, and the Upper and Bedford Ouse Catchment Partnership and is a Board Member of Delphic HSE.
He is a visiting professor at Cranfield University where from October 2015 to December 2020 he was Professor of Environmental Assessment and was a Member of the Government's Natural Capital Committee.
Immediately prior to this, he was Chief Executive of the Environment Agency for more than seven years. Prior to joining the EA in 1998 he worked for more than 20 years in the private sector.
