March 10th, 2026
Meeting the moment: ELF’s refreshed organisational strategy
By Robin Pierro, ELF CEO
Across the UK, communities are increasingly facing environmental harms, from sewage pollution and illegal waste dumping to major development initiatives that threaten vital ecosystems. These issues directly affect people’s health, wellbeing and livelihoods while also placing pressure on the natural world.
For more than three decades, the Environmental Law Foundation has played a critical role standing alongside grassroots communities working to tackle these issues head on.
With this role in mind, we have recently taken time to reflect on how we can adapt our strategy to best respond to the changing landscape we find ourselves in. Our new strategy is not a reinvention of our work. Rather, it is a refreshed articulation of our mission and how we will strengthen our work to meet the challenges ahead.
Responding to a shifting landscape
The environmental policy landscape in the UK is changing quickly. As the government pushes to accelerate development, reforms such as the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 are introducing new environmental risks. While framed as a route to economic growth, these changes raise serious questions about how communities can participate in decisions that shape their lives and how the UK intends to safeguard what little nature it has left.
At the same time, a toxic narrative about nature continues to unfold. Nature is too often framed as an obstacle to societal progress rather than the foundation upon which all life depends. And increasingly, those who stand up to protect it are vilified, criminalized or weaponised in political debates.
Access to environmental justice remains deeply unequal, a problem exacerbated by growing inequality. Challenging environmental harm requires time, resources and power that many communities do not have, leaving those most affected by environmental issues with the fewest tools to respond. In parallel, the UK’s commitment to the Aarhus Convention, intended to safeguard public participation and access to justice in environmental matters, appears increasingly uncertain.
Meanwhile, the systems governing environmental decision-making are becoming ever more complex. Communities often face a maze of planning processes, regulatory procedures and opaque information systems when trying to understand or challenge decisions affecting their local environment.
Taken together, these trends present a troubling picture.
Yet there are also reasons for hope.
Communities across the UK are not backing down. Every single day, neighbours, families and community groups are coming together to ask questions, gather evidence and stand up for the places they care about. Slowly but surely, they are winning important victories and holding the line with courage and determination.
New ideas are also gaining ground. Concepts such as the Rights of Nature are beginning to take root, with communities exploring new legal approaches to recognising and protecting ecosystems at the local level.
Alongside this, there is a growing network of organisations working together to advance environmental justice. NGOs, campaign groups, investigative journalists and community networks are bringing new tools, skills and partnerships to this work.
The groundswell of energy in community halls, village greens, offices and online spaces across the UK feels powerful. People want change, and they are working together to achieve it.
Our focus for the years ahead
Against this backdrop, ELF’s refreshed strategy focuses on three mutually reinforcing strategic pillars.
1. Supporting communities to understand and use the law
At the heart of ELF’s work is our free legal advice service. Every day we continue to hear from communities facing environmental harm. Our support enables them to understand the law, navigate complex legal and regulatory processes, participate more meaningfully in decision-making and hold powerful actors to account.
Last year, we responded to 381 requests for legal support, and we anticipate a significant increase in enquiries coming through our helpline over the next year.
As we move ahead, our legal team will continue delivering vital services while also leveraging the expertise of our professional membership network. This network now includes more than 150 leading barristers, solicitors and technical experts across the UK who volunteer their time to provide legal advice and litigation support to the communities we serve.
2. Strengthening the environmental justice ecosystem
Moving ahead, ELF will play an increasingly important convening role within the environmental justice sector.
We will continue to build and maintain our professional membership network, ensuring it not only provides vital pro bono support to communities but also serves as a platform for shared learning, collaboration and advocacy across the legal sector.
Our university network will remain another central pillar of our work. Through delivering clinics across more than 20 universities, we plan to continue developing the next generation of environmental lawyers while also producing research and insights that advance our work.
We will also continue strengthening our community network, facilitating peer support and knowledge sharing between communities facing similar environmental challenges.
Finally, ELF will remain an active participant in coalitions and working groups, ensuring the lived experiences of our community partners informs action across the environmental sector.
3. Ensuring communities have a say in the policies and practices impacting their lives
The experiences of the communities we support provide valuable insight into how environmental policies are playing out at the local level.
Over the coming years, ELF will leverage this insight by undertaking research that draws on our casework data and the lived experiences of the communities we serve. This will allow us to contribute analysis and evidence-based recommendations to environmental debates while strengthening environmental policy and access to justice.
We will also deepen our support for communities advancing the Rights of Nature. Building on the progress made over the past year, ELF will continue supporting community-led efforts to develop, adopt and implement Rights of Nature frameworks, embedding new protections for nature at the local authority level.
Delivering this work requires not only strong programmes but also a resilient and sustainable organisation. Alongside our programmatic priorities, ELF will continue investing in organisational health: strengthening our systems, partnerships, communications and funding base so that we can deliver our mission effectively over the long term.
As environmental pressures grow, ensuring that communities can understand, use and shape the laws that protect the places they care about has never been more important. At ELF, we remain committed to standing alongside communities so that when environmental harm occurs, they do not have to face it alone.