banner law summer 2026 - CDR Summer School

Climate Change Law & Science: Exploring the interplay between legal systems and climate change science

Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to legal systems, governance structures, and the production and use of scientific knowledge. As these challenges cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries, addressing climate change requires sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between legal scholarship and climate science.

Against this backdrop, the summer school “Climate Change Law & Science: Exploring the interplay between legal systems and climate change science” offers an in-depth, research-focused exploration of the evolving relationship between climate change law and climate science.

Villa Vigoni - Menaggio (CO), Lake Como

Location

20 – 25 July 2026

Dates

20

Number of participants

€1950,00

Registration Fee (VAT excluded)

Course Overview

Against this backdrop, this summer school offers an in-depth, research-focused exploration of the evolving relationship between climate change law and climate science.

The course examines how scientific knowledge is generated, assessed, and translated into legal principles, regulatory tools, and litigation strategies. Through expert lectures, interactive discussions, and hands-on workshops, participants will critically engage with the law–science interface and reflect on emerging governance challenges, including the role of courts and the implications of new scientific developments for specific accountability and broader climate governance.

Program

The course combines lectures and hands-on sessions. The main topics include:

How is climate science produce and assessed, and how does this shape the scientific understanding of present and future climate change? This topic explores the processes through which climate knowledge is generated, including the use of scientific methods, modelling tools and assessment frameworks. It also considers the current state of climate science and the role of certainty and uncertainty in future scenarios.

How does climate science influence decision-making processes and policy frameworks? The aim is to reveal how climate science influences legal norms, regulatory instruments and policy responses at international, regional and national levels.

How do courts, regulators and policymakers interpret and use scientific evidence? This question explores how legal and regulatory institutions engage with climate-related scientific evidence, focusing particularly on accountability mechanisms and climate litigation.

What role does climate science play in climate litigation, particularly regarding causation, standards of proof and challenges relating to evidence? This question focuses on the interaction between climate science, especially attribution science, and legal systems. It analyses how scientific findings are used to establish responsibility and causation within the evolving framework of climate governance.

Learning objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

critically understand and explain how climate science is produced, assessed and communicated, including the roles of scientific methods, modelling tools and assessment frameworks.
understand the relationship between law and science, and explain how climate science informs legal norms, regulatory frameworks, and decision-making processes.
recognise and integrate climate-related scientific evidence into legal strategies, policy development, and regulatory compliance.
analyse litigation and accountability frameworks by examining climate litigation cases, assessing enforcement mechanisms and anticipating how scientific developments can shape future legal risks and accountability.
develop interdisciplinary problem-solving skills by critically assessing complex, real-world climate scenarios, proposing evidence-based legal solutions, and navigating the interaction between law and science.

Final output and assignment

Students will be invited to contribute to a collective publication designed to advance interdisciplinary understanding of the intersection between climate law and climate science.
During the programme, participants will work in small groups on selected thematic areas, such as attribution science and causation, evidentiary challenges in climate litigation, regulatory responses or corporate accountability, which will form the basis of short written outputs developed throughout and after the summer school.

A selection of these contributions will be refined further and integrated into an open-access collective publication, which aims to showcase the emerging interdisciplinary perspectives of early-career researchers and bridge the gap between academic research and policy-relevant insights. The publication will also contribute to the ongoing debate on the role of science in climate law and litigation.

Faculty

Ivano Alogna – Director of the course

Dr. Ivano Alogna is the Research Leader in Environmental and Climate Change Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) and heads the Institute’s programme in this field. He is an Associate Member of the Sorbonne Research Institute in International and European Law, Sorbonne Law School, and a member of several international expert groups in environmental law. He has lectured at universities in every continent and co-edited influential books like Climate Change Litigation: Global Perspectives (Brill, 2021) and Climate Change Litigation in Europe (Intersentia, 2023). His award-winning PhD thesis – Special Jury Prize by the French Society of Environmental Law (SFDE) – La circulation des modèles juridiques dans le domaine de l’environnement (Sorbonne Law School, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) is forthcoming with LGDJ.

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Elisa Fiorini Beckhauser

Elisa Fiorini Beckhauser is a PhD student in Law and Sustainability at the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Salento (Italy), and a researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change in the Institute for Climate Resilience. She holds a bachelor’s degree in law from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil) and is involved in international initiatives such as the ‘Climate Litigation in the Global South’ project of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment. She is also co-leader of the ‘Next generation environmental law research’ project of the Early Career Specialist Group of the World Commission on Environmental Law, and is an expert of the Harmony with Nature Network of the United Nations in the category of Young Professional in Earth-Centred Law.

Giovanni Conti

Dr. Giovanni Conti graduated cum laude with a Master’s in Theoretical Physics from the University of Parma in 2011 and earned his Ph.D. in 2016 from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, specializing in the Science and Management of Climate Change with a focus on Dynamic Climatology. Following three and a half years as a postdoctoral researcher at Hamburg University, where he worked on chaotic advection, turbulence, and passive tracer dynamics, he joined the CMCC in 2020. Dr. Conti’s research spans a range of topics, including the study of climate phenomena such as ENSO, employing advanced techniques like Path Integrals, Transition Matrices, and the Fokker-Planck equation. His expertise also covers chaotic advection, turbulence, point vortex dynamics, and data assimilation. Currently a Junior Scientist at CMCC, Dr. Conti is focused on developing an atmospheric data assimilation system and investigating the biases that impact seasonal forecast simulations.

Requirements

The maximum age at the time of application is 40 years old.
The Summer School is mainly geared towards Master’s, Ph.D. students, postdocs and early-career researchers and professionals in relevant fields;
Language Proficiency in English is required, with good communication and writing skills.