“The role of expert evidence in climate change litigation” as a focus of the Proclimex International Conference

On 9th and 10th of December 2025, the international conference of the Proclimex project took place at the University of Aix-Marseille. Focusing on “The role of expert evidence in climate change litigation: its production, acceptance, uses, and effects”, the event – gathering around forty scientists and researchers – represents the outcome of a multi-year research project.

After two full days of presentations and discussions, Professor Amandine Orsini delivered the conference’s closing remarks. She highlighted the main take-aways of the discussions, such as the fact that the law is constantly evolving and being shaped; that litigation is a major source of innovation; and that the law is shaped by various dynamics of power.

As a political scientist, she focused on the main topic of study within her discipline: power structures and domination. This perspective shed light on a number of different dimensions of power dynamics that underpin climate litigation and that emerged during the conference discussions.

Thus, for example, the law tends to sometimes put aside temporal considerations, to the detriment of future generations, often overlooked in final legal decisions.

Additional power dynamics lie even inside the Courts, as they have a form of hegemony in selecting the voices and the experts they choose to listen to.

Eventually, domination structures persist through the hierarchy of knowledge and the resulting epistemological inequalities. International agreements such as the Paris Agreement and international scientific conclusions such as the IPCC reports carry significant authority and seem to be an important reference in climate litigation. Health expertise also appeared to be an important reference in legal decisions. However, experiential knowledge from the climate crisis remains sidelined and often overlooked by the Courts.

The PhD candidates of the CLAIM project, Gabriel Ajabu, Luna Jalocha, and Florine Serrault also attended the event and had fruitful exchanges and conversations with colleagues from different universities. Thus, the Proclimex international conference was a great momentum for the start of the CLAIM project, paving the way for future scientific collaborations.