Natchaya Pichetsatha

Natchaya Pichetsatha is a master of laws (LL.M.) candidate at Stanford Law School, specializing in environmental law and policy. Currently, she is taking part in the Environmental Law Pro Bono at Stanford Law School supporting the work of the California Air Resources Board and Communities for a Better Environment. To complete her graduate study at Stanford, Natchaya was awarded a Thai graduate scholarship from Fulbright. Natchaya grew up in Thailand, where she received her bachelor of laws (LL.B.) from Chulalongkorn University, with a public law major. After graduation, she worked as a policy analyst at Future Forward Party, the fourth largest political party in Thailand. Her responsibilities mainly involved the legislative process of amending or drafting environmental regulations/policies and preparing data analysis on environmental issues. Her work also involved the legislative proposal of The Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers Act, also known as PRTR, which is a cooperative attempt between civil societies and policymakers to use the environmental democracy approach to solve air pollution issues in Thailand by increasing public access to environmental information.

Prior to starting her study at Stanford, she was a lawyer with the environmental litigation and advocacy non-profit organization, Enlawthai Foundation. She represented the indigenous Karen Klity Community located in western Thailand, in the lead-polluted Klity Creek remediation case, which is the first toxic remediation case in the country and has established precedent for subsequent cases. It became a legal battle to enforce an effective clean-up, as the village and the creek were heavily polluted with lead-contaminated waste from the nearby lead mine. Many residents suffered from lead poisoning, miscarriages and even severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. Natchaya is passionate about environmental democracy, air pollution and climate change, public participation, environmental justicea and legislation. Currently, she is working on her thesis "The feasibility of using Environmental Democracy Approaches to tackle Climate and Environmental Crises in Authoritarian Regimes: How to incentivize/force the government to adopt the approaches".