We invite contributions that critically examine how scientific knowledge is translated into legal and regulatory systems and how legal processes, in turn, shape the production, selection, and interpretation of the scientific practices, hypotheses, and forms of knowledge emerging in the biodiversity space. How do legal mandates, frameworks and preoccupations influence what counts as the “best available science”? How do legal and governance institutions navigate ecological uncertainty, plural knowledge systems, and competing interests? And how can regulatory and governance frameworks remain responsive to ecological realities without undermining legal legitimacy?
We particularly encourage interdisciplinary submissions, comparative work, case-studies and insights grounded in practice. This session aims to surface the assumptions, frictions, and creative possibilities that emerge when science and law attempt to speak to one another under pressure.
To what extent do laws affect the capacity of human and non-human animals to coexist with anthropogenic stressors that threaten their survival across generations? Progressive legal scholars have argued extensively that modern international law fragmenting, reductive, and anthropocentric approach to the environmental crises renders it incapable of addressing existential consequences to human and non-human life, and is in fact often complicit in enabling them. To respond to the inadeguacies of modern international environmental law to address the planetary polycrisis, authors have adopted a system’s ontology to promote large-scale regulatory interventions. However, so far these authors have fallen victim to the same errors they try to overcome with its critiques, reiteratig failures which keep environmental governance unable to offer respond to biodiveersity loss and social injustice. In response, I present a conceptual framework informed by complexity science to address how the role of the law can be understood and empirically studied as determinant of the possibility for multispecies coexistence. In this framework, socioecological systems (SES) are viewed as made of interactions and processes which maintain interdependency and allow for coexistence. In this context of struggles for SES coexistence, the framework presents laws as enabling or limiting constraints affecting the ability of human and non-human life to respond (Response-Ability) to anthropogenic interactions which threaten their capacity to survive across generations. The framework I present is developed with the intention of having value for both legal theory and praxis, providing a research methodology for the empirical legal study of how laws can be held accountable for socioecological struggles for survival. As part of my project, I present how I apply the framework to the empirical study of how South African regulations affect the capacity of local costal communities to respond to stressors from the mining industry which is threatening their livelihoods, and the survival of diverse forms of marine life.
How to cite: Mazzi, A.: Introducing the paradigm of complexity to the legal sciences as an approach to understanding the role of law in the struggle for socioecological coexistence., World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-307, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-307, 2026.
Law plays a key role in protecting and promoting biodiversity at the national and global level and cannot be based on rules-of-thumb or wishful thinking. Law-making procedures should be evidence-based, that is, should be informed by an empirical assessment of the likely consequences of proposed legal frameworks. The ex ante appraisal of proposals offers objective information that lawmakers can incorporate in the discussion to address ecological concerns. Furthermore, the ex post assessment of policies can provide legislators with valuable information on the actual effectiveness of legal instruments. Scientific knowledge should be put at the service of the law-making process. However, ‘evidence-based’ approaches face several difficulties. First, the concept of evidence is contentious. Different types of ‘evidence’ can enter the discussion and there are no clear rules on how evidence should be evaluated. The qualification of information as ‘evidence’ is not a neutral, objective judgement, but the result of a decision made by someone in a particular context. Second, law-makers may find it difficult to sort out the ‘best’ evidence from all the available information since scientists often disagree. Legislative bodies may also lack the necessary expertise to understand the complexity of the information before them. Finally, incorporating scientific evidence into law-making processes is challenging given the deep interconnection between law-making and politics. Quite ironically, there is little evidence of the impact of evidence in law-making processes. Legislators are often influenced by other factors besides scientific findings and have to balance competing interests. Over the past decade it has become de rigueur for governments and international organisations to underline the need for ‘evidence-based’ laws and regulations. Still, evidence-based approaches should not be seen as a magical potion. Scientific knowledge is rarely situated at the centre of legislative debates. Alternative expressions such as ‘evidence-informed’ or ‘evidence-influenced’ law-making seem more suitable. The role of evidence is to inform the legislative process rather than driving it. When the debate is based on evidence and data, the role of science in the law-making process is enhanced, making more space for science to play a meaningful role in the protection and promotion of biodiversity.
How to cite: Dias Simões, F.: The role of evidence in biodiversity law-making, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-90, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-90, 2026.
The years 2024 and 2025 marked a turning point for international climate law and its relationship with knowledge. A series of landmark decisions (the ICJ, Inter-American CtHR, ITLOS, and ECtHR) have reshaped not only substantive climate obligations but also a deeper, often overlooked question: how does international climate law know? By tracing these developments, this proposal aims to achieve two goals: argue that international climate law operates as a regulatory epistemic system; and, subsequently interrogate what are the contacting points of that legal epistemic system with the biodiversity protection.
As starting point, across these fora, states advanced a traditional doctrinal argument: the scope of their climate obligations must be determined within the four corners of treaty text, sovereignty considerations, and legal reasoning alone. All four tribunals rejected this view: climate science and socio-ecological risk considerations are integral components of legal interpretation. This conceptual move mirrored the proceedings themselves where a pluralised evidentiary practice was considered inviting experts, communities, and scientific bodies to share a procedural space. These practices signal an emerging epistemic architecture for the climate regime, reflecting what counts as valid climate knowledge, whose knowledge must be heard, and what methodological qualities evidence must meet to shape legal meaning.
Taken together, these rulings reveal a redesign of climate law’s epistemologies. First, they clarify that states (and increasingly private actors) have a duty to know: a positive, iterative, dynamic, participatory, and horizontal obligation to generate, access, assess, and share climate-relevant information. Second, they illuminate the interdependence between human rights and climate epistemics, particularly through the right to science, due diligence duties, and participatory epistemic rights.
This epistemic shift might have direct implications for biodiversity governance: (1) the tribunals’ reasoning relied heavily on biodiversity instruments (e.g. CBD and UNCLOS) revealing a bidirectional flow of epistemic standards between the biodiversity and climate regimes; (2) This raises the question regarding to the extent to which climate-law epistemic standards can be transferred into biodiversity regulation; and (3) the possibility that epistemic participation (now recognised as a human right) could migrate into biodiversity law as a normative requirement.
How to cite: Cornejo, C.: How International Climate Law knows?The emerging epistemic architecture in the climate regime and its links to the international biodiversity regime, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-866, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-866, 2026.
Legal systems routinely require that biodiversity decisions be “based on the best available science”, yet the interface between scientific knowledge, legal evidence, and what counts as “best” is far from straightforward or uncontested in practice. An important question for biodiversity decision-making and conservation is what happens to scientific material during legal processes. The tensions between the sciences and law are highlighted in this paper which presents a legal practitioner's analysis of South African and international biodiversity disputes and contested administrative or pre-litigation decisions, including those relating to African penguins, baboon-human wildlife conflict, and sandeel fishing closures.
This paper explores which scientific knowledge is officially sanctioned — and what is sidelined — by legal processes, evidentiary rules, institutional expectations, and the construction of legal “truths”. Contested scientific knowledge sits uneasily with legal rules and frameworks, which require finality, with the legal procedure of administrative review preferring uncontested “facts” and the adversarial legal system positioning difference as opposition. Affidavits, comment–response documents and legal argument thus tend to translate complex scientific debates into legally recognisable “facts”, frequently along polarised lines. Diverse scientific practices are reassembled into a unitary “legal science” that can be assessed, weighed, and ordered within the frameworks available to legal reasoning, often smoothing over scientific uncertainty, disagreement, or methodological variation.
The result of these processes is that scientific knowledge becomes legally “useful” and officially sanctioned not because it is necessarily “best” according to any particular scientific measure, but because it can be accommodated by, and translated into forms acceptable to, law. It is thus argued that scientific knowledge is most readily integrated into legal and administrative processes when it is stable, uncontested, and compatible with evidentiary and procedural norms. By contrast, scientific uncertainty, trade-offs, disciplinary difference, and plural approaches challenge the law to re-form and re-create a stable scientific artefact that can support legal reasoning. The paper concludes with reflections on how scientists, lawyers, and decision-makers might better navigate the challenge of translation, without resorting to the “black boxing” of science or marginalising the shifts and variations inherent to biodiversity functioning, thereby enabling legal forums to engage meaningfully with ecological knowledge.
How to cite: Braude, N.: Translating Science for the Courtroom: Black Boxes, Evidence, and Legal Truths, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-789, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-789, 2026.
Biodiversity loss demands governance approaches that acknowledge ecological complexity, diverse values, and rapidly evolving practices. While Earth Systems Law (ESL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm in climate governance, its potential has not yet been systematically explored for biodiversity governance. This paper argues that ESL offers a more suitable legal and conceptual framework for the distinctive epistemic, governance and legitimacy challenges that biodiversity governance faces. Our case study here concerns biodiversity finance. Biodiversity finance is scaling rapidly in parallel with global disclosure mandates and nature-market expansions. Yet how these developments are aligned with corresponding evolutions in scientific and legal architecture remains unclear. This introduces significant potential risks for actors and systems.
In climate finance, metrics, values, and causal pathways are comparatively stabilized through robust epistemic and scientific practices. In biodiversity finance, deeper scientific and normative contestations exist. Investments are shaped by conflicting priorities and justifications driven by divergent anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric positions. Varied scientific approaches to measurement across taxa, scales, and ecosystems mean that financial practices remain contested and indicators often rely on normative assumptions and understandings of “good” conservation. Moreover, reflexive causal links between financial instruments and ecological outcomes are often uncertain, indirect, or speculative.
Together, these conditions generate significant ambiguity for providers and recipients of finance. They also create significant legal and policy challenges as reflected by emerging litigation concerning biodiversity-related greenwashing. Additionally, while the financial and socio-economic systemic risk implications of biodiversity loss are recognized, prudential regulatory mechanisms related to such risks remain in a nascent stage of development.
We argue that current prudential, civil and criminal monitoring and sanction regimes are not sufficiently attuned to the scientific and interpretative complexities of knowledge emerging in the biodiversity space. Building on socio-legal research and systems governance theory, we show how Earth Systems Law can provide clearer normative grounding in biodiversity finance while also better accommodating uncertainty, and strengthening accountability. The paper concludes with concrete implications for regulatory design, liability frameworks, and emerging ESG standards, focusing on areas likely to become critical over the next decade, including disclosure rules, verification duties, and claims assessment in biodiversity markets.
How to cite: de Bruin, B. and Kashyap, S.: From Science into Governance: The Promise of Earth Systems Law: A Case Study on Biodiversity Finance, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-542, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-542, 2026.
