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.

Deltas are economic and environmental hotspots, food baskets for many nations, and home to a large portion of the world population. They sustain rich, biodiverse ecosystems and related services. Most deltas are also international and regional transportation hubs that support intense economic activity. Yet, deltas are deteriorating at an alarming rate due to climate impacts (e.g., sea level rise and flooding), human-induced catchment changes (e.g., water and sediment flow reduction), and local exploitation (e.g., sand, groundwater, and hydrocarbon extraction). The international science community recognizes the need to develop a solid knowledge base for protecting these vulnerable coastal systems, and this BF initiative leads the way by coordinating and enhancing innovative international work towards the development of a science-based framework for delta sustainability. The project will develop a versatile modeling framework that may be applied from local to national levels to evaluate the unique functioning, critical stressors, and vulnerability of the world’s deltas. The framework will ingest social, economic, physical and ecosystem data into an open-access repository and will allow planners to model and deliver optimized, viable solutions for their region. In areas for which detailed data are sparse, an infrastructure for critical data gathering will be developed and modeling and prediction tools will be customized. The framework will initially be applied to three case-studies for which local and regional partnerships are already in place, including the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM), Mekong, and Amazon deltas. The team represents the BF-G8 countries: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Norway, India, Japan, UK, and USA, and includes partners in the Netherlands, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. It is composed of government and university researchers, and NGO’s, working closely with policymakers. The training of graduate students and post-docs able to work across disciplinary boundaries and countries will also be a unique legacy of the project.