Expertise in climate litigation: production, uses and reception – PROCLIMEX

A growing number of actors and organisations are therefore now using litigation – in various ways and with varying degrees of success – as an instrument of contestation, mobilisation and beyond that, climate justice. In a context of renewed environmental democracy and participatory approaches (see the French Great Debate or National Climate Convention), the courtroom is one of the spaces that have recently been reclaimed, where citizens participate in the making of tomorrow's 'climate law'.
Many questions are raised by this new form of mobilisation for climate. Our team proposes to focus on the issue of expertise in these trials. Indeed, this is a fundamental issue in climate trials. For the plaintiffs, first, because they must argue a given point of view in favour of climate protection and have no choice but to appropriate knowledge and data from various sources, which are technical, complex and multidisciplinary (not only scientific, but also socio-economic and legal sources) and to build on this basis an expert system that is often enriched by lay knowledge (victims' testimonies, for example).
It is also fundamental for the outcome of the trial, which is largely determined by these expert systems at the heart of the claimants' legal strategies.
The main objectives of PROCLIMEX are as follows:
- To shed light on the judicial strategies of NGOs when they use litigation and the law as weapons against climate change, and on those of defendants in response (often States and corporations);
- To decipher the social uses of different sources of expertise in the context of initiatives supporting the judicialisation -i.e. the procedures used by the supporters of a cause to ensure that the courts appear able to provide an answer to the issues they denounce- of the climate cause;
- To highlight, through comparative analysis, the process of moving from scientific truth to legal truth by questioning the adaptation of procedural law and of the trial as an institution;
- To identify opportunities to strengthen the interface between scientists and policy-makers in climate matters in a context of climate emergency, thanks to focused efforts on scientific communication.