Research Themes
The Environment component brings together professors and lecturers, CNRS researchers and PhD students in both public and private law around three research themes:
- Law and Environmental Sciences
Here the research focuses on questioning the reactions and changes in law when it encounters environmental sciences (biophysical sciences, humanities and social sciences). The work focuses on identified research themes such as climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem services, the Earth system, the market, farming, enterprise, democracy and environmental justice). The research is epistemological in nature when it analyses the legal integration of concepts, data, techniques and scientific methods. It is also interdisciplinary when it partakes in the construction of a joint research topic as part of collective research.
- Responses in law to global changes (climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem services, natural resources)
To respond to the ecological emergency, law provides a framework for observation and action in order to identify and tackle the environmental challenges facing society. Among these challenges, climate change, the depletion of natural resources and the erosion of biodiversity and ecosystem services are analysed in particular. Our research analyses the diversity of legal responses and their legal force on different biogeographic scales and levels of legal decision-making. The efficacy and effectiveness of these responses involves analysis of how environmental requirements are integrated into the various spheres of law. Analysis is also performed at the very core of environmental law where different interests and environmental objectives clash, thus requiring the substantial enhancement of integrated approaches to protection and management.
- Rethinking our legal models in the Anthropocene
Certain schools of thought such as that of planetary boundaries or Earth system governance highlight the need to rethink our legal models on the scale of the Earth, a fact that has been accentuated by our entry into the Anthropocene. This invites us to review our ways of conceiving environmental law, in particular by creating stronger interaction between local and global scales. This sub-component is likely to lead to collective reflection on the need and the possibilities of rethinking our legal models with regard to the ecological and social challenges facing us.
