Katya Burns
Katya Burns is a political scientist and human rights advocate. She received a grant from CAF for a project that critiqued the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from an animal rights perspective, presenting a strong argument for incorporating animals rights into global development and human rights programming. Katya’s research links organizations active in the animals rights movement with global development discussions. She writes:
The mission of my project is to raise the profile of animal rights in the context of the SDGs for 2030. The SDGs underpin global economic development, climate and human rights programming. Lack of attention to animal rights, and in particular, to the global proliferation of industrial animal agriculture and the associated rise in meat consumption in developing countries, critically impact progress towards the SDGs.
At the International Animal Rights Conference in 2020, Katya spoke on the topic of “Animals’ Rights: address the gap to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.” In 2021, Katya presented her research “Land Use and Industrial Animal Agriculture: Changing the Paradigm Toward a Sustainable Future” at the Animal Rights Conference in Luxemburg and in the International Conference on Sustainable Development in New York (ICSD 2020). While the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Katya’s ability to conduct planned key informant interviews and delayed the timeline of her research, she still managed to speak at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Athens, PA and secured an invitation to showcase her research at the Open Society Foundations for their Climate Justice Initiative. Katya has started exploring opportunities to teach university-level courses on animal flights and sustainable development.
Due to CAF’s support, in August 2025, Katya is presenting at the Asia for Animals Conference in Taipei on “Making it Happen: How to Successfully Advocate for National Policy and Legal Change by Engaging the United Nations. Lessons for Farmed Animals from the Fields of Gender Equality, Human Rights, and HIV.” She will also be presenting at the International Animal Rights Conference in Luxembourg in September 2025, on “Decolonizing the Funding Model for Animal Rights and Welfare: An Interactive Session that Explores Ways to Raise the Profile, Scale up the Impact, and Expand the Funding Base for Animal Rights Work in the Global South.”