The Clinic: Environmental justice and ecological transition (jete)

The French association for urban agriculture (AFAUP) has been working on the recognition of community gardens in the urban landscape since 2022 to accelerate the ecological and food transition in cities. A law from 1976 (loi Royer) grants land protection to certain types of community gardens, but other forms which appeared in the 1990s are not included in this protection regime. A new bill was proposed in the early 2000s by the Senate, but it was never passed by the National Assembly. The stakes today are to unite the representatives of different forms of community gardens to work out a new text collaboratively and collectively. 

In a first instance, the student team will be analysing the 2003 proposition and enriching it with new dynamics that evolved in the past 20 years. After this first phase, the student team will develop workshops with stakeholders, to result in a transposition in legal terms of present issues and in concrete suggestions for a new bill. This bill aims to integrate sometimes contradictory priorities to grant the same level of protection to different forms of collective gardens and avoid competition.

• Partner : Association Française d'Agriculture Urbaine Professionnelle (AFAUP)
• Tutor : Coline Grimée

The project aims to draw up a European inventory of access to agricultural land, namely, to identify the different legal tools that allow it and/or constitute blockages. In this way, students are encouraged to take an interest in rural law in Europe and the different systems depending on the country. In summary, it is first a question of having a clear vision of the legal tools that exist by questioning the resulting effects.

Once this inventory work has been carried out, (it is impossible to be completely exhaustive given the great diversity of systems in Europe and the language barrier), the aim is to succeed in determining tools which can present solutions to facilitate and encourage the installation of young people. Students are thus led to question the means of removing identified blockages, but also to take into consideration the limits of solutions already tested.

Faced with the impossibility of making an exhaustive inventory of all European national situations, rural law being a national law and the European Union having no competence in the matter, students have proposed creating an analysis grid, where all identified legal tools will be listed. This grid can subsequently be applied to all countries in Europe to identify the blockages and the solutions to be found. This analysis grid will be offered in the form of an interactive tool and easy to use.

The final objective is to nourish the reflection of Agroecology Europe for its advocacy on the subject of the installation of young people in agroecology. A policy workshop where students will speak and present their tool will be organized at the end of the Clinic.

• Partner : Agroecology Europe
• Tutors : Inès Bouchema and Eve Aubisse 

According to the IPBES, industrial fishing is the main cause of marine ecosystem collapse. At the national and European level, industrial fishing lobbies succeed in preventing the adoption of any laws to protect marine biodiversity and small-scale fishing and to circumvent existing regulations. Cases of corruption and fraud involving subsidies, quotas and prohibited fishing techniques are numerous, but their identification is difficult due to the opacity of the sector, and often rely on the testimonies and reports of rare whistle-blowers.

The project aims to develop action guides to make is easier to detect and take legal action in cases of corruption and fraud in the maritime environment, based in particular on the analysis of quota allocation systems and subsidies at national and local level.

• Partner: BLOOM association
• Tutor: Alice Messin-Roizard

Up to 90% of global deforestation is caused by the expansion of agriculture into forested areas. Global deforestation is not only a climate problem, it is also the leading cause of global loss of terrestrial biodiversity and is often associated with human rights violations against indigenous peoples, local communities and conservationists.

Through its soya imports intended almost exclusively for livestock feed, the European livestock industry indirectly contributes to deforestation in third countries, and particularly in Brazil. The European Union is thus the second largest importer of deforestation in the world.

The project aims to explore the legal tools that can be used to force players in this industry to better take into account the environmental and human impacts of their activities in the supply chain.

• Partner: ClientEarth 
• Tutor : Camille Fromentin

The project mobilizes the clinic students on the implementation of recommendations from the Economic Social Environmental Council (CESE) report "Gender inequalities, climate crisis and ecological transition" by Antoine Gatet and Aminata Niakaté.

In close collaboration with the authors of the report, students are required to select four recommendations to be made as part of an advocacy strategy. They will need to define the advocacy strategy and the milestones to put it in place for each of the recommendations retained. The work of the first semester focuses on the issue of female climate refugees, a subject which, also thanks to their work, has been able to find resonance with political leaders and elected officials.

• Partner: Conseil Economique Social et Environnemental (CESE) 
• Tutor : Floriane Volt 

“Restructuring shared public services using the example of carpooling lines” is an action-research project carried out in partnership with the social and solidarity economy company ECOV, operator of carpooling lines for local authorities.

To meet mobility transition objectives, ECOV intends to transform individual cars into a mode of collective transport for peri-urban and rural areas. The collective use of cars is developed in close cooperation with local authorities who are responsible for transport. Carpooling lines also rely on the organization of communities of carpoolers at the local level who co-produce and contribute to the development of the service.

Developed to meet sobriety objectives, local carpooling lines form an original type of collective service. Co-produced by its users, its emergence questions the governance of legal notions as fundamental as “public service” and requires imagining the basis of a “shared public service” using this concrete example. This notion proposed by ECOV places citizens at the center of the production of essential services. Its conceptualization on the example of local carpooling lines mobilizes the theory of the commons to think of an inspiring legal regime for other services (existing or future), and more adapted to the challenges of an ecological, inclusive, and just transition.

• Partner: Ecov (Harald Condé Piquer, Marine Bruno and Thomas Matagne)
• Student team: Lucile Lambert and Clément Dalisson
• Tutors: Anaïs Morin Guerry and Lola Mercier

If the regime for access to environmental information is often criticized because of the procedural difficulties that applicants face, the substantive processing of access requests by persons subject to the obligation to communicate is also exposed to many grievances. The way in which public persons or persons entrusted with a public service mission and administrative justice take into consideration and provide a response to requests for access appears to be inadequate, particularly when the information in question relates to the nuclear sector.

The objective of this study is therefore, based on legislative and regulatory texts, case law, doctrine, cases brought by Greenpeace as well as interviews conducted with all stakeholders, to define the substantial or substantive obstacles faced by parties seeking access to environmental information in the nuclear sector. It emerges that three main axes, representing three series of difficulties, emerge. They are addressed successively in the study.

Firstly, the exception to communication based on breach of business secrecy, provided for in articles L. 331-6 of the CRPA and L. 124-4 of the Environmental Code, is a clear obstacle to access effective environmental information

Secondly, the balancing of interests, a prerequisite for any communication decision in the presence of a possible breach of business secrecy, seems to be carried out in a truncated manner by the persons subject to the obligation of communication.

Lastly, the specificity of the regime of access to emissions into the environment tends to disappear due to the restrictive assessment given to it by the Conseil d’État.

• Partner: Greenpeace France
• Tutor: Paul Peyret 

Pollinators play an essential role for biodiversity but also for the social and economic well-being of human beings. While pollinators are responsible for around 1/3 of the total volume of global food production and represent an ecosystem service estimated by the OECD at $10 billion on a global scale, they face more and more pressures induced by human activity.

It is in agricultural environments that pollinators are experiencing an unprecedented decline in France. This phenomenon should be put into perspective with the large-scale use of a pesticide from the neonicotinoid family: imidacloprid, which has been widely used in France since the 1990s. The harmful effects of imidacloprid on pollinators are widely documented, and its dangerousness for the environment led to its ban by France in 2016 and by the European Union in 2018. However, its use was still “exceptionally” permitted in France on several occasions between 2020 and 2022. 

Given the social and economic value of the ecosystem service of pollination, particularly regarding farmers who suffer directly or indirectly from the decline of pollinators, this project aims, through legal and economic analysis, to lay the groundwork for an argument aimed at obtaining compensation for the damage suffered. 

The project aims, in the legal framework applicable to produce a deliverable offering advocacy elements to the service of farmers who have suffered economic damage due to the decline of pollinators induced using imidacloprid. 

• Partner: Intérêt à Agir
• Tutor : Sarah Becker

Following the explosion of the health scandal in the Chemical Valley (Lyon) in 2022 by the “Vert de Rage” team and scientist Jacob de Boer denouncing the abnormally high levels of several types of PFAS collected in the air, water, soil as well as breast milk and their consequent impact on the local population, a lack of regulation at national and European level and a circumvention of the application of existing rules was noted.

The project aims to carry out a global comparative study on PFAS regulations and bans put in place with a view to promoting regulation of these harmful substances and fueling transpartisan debates on the issue at the national level.

• Partner:  Notre Affaire à Tous Lyon (NAAT)
• Tutor: Philippine Garrigue