2.2 Threat Airports And Governance's Liability Case Study

3.2.2 Threaten airports and governance’s liability
Under radical uncertainty making airports’ governance fully responsible for potential damages seems difficult. In fact, their liability depends heavily of how the local and national authorities considered (or consider) the rise of seas associated to climate change. This last one depends on the convergence or the divergence of scientists’ views about a given event (here the strength and the range of the rise of the seas).
Case 1: Convergent views among scientists.
The convergence may bear about some high or moderate increase of the sea level. The decision-takers will accept more easily moderate ones than high ones. Nevertheless, the most important is the consensus among scientists’ because the infrastructures’ governance must accept it. Indeed, in case of harm, the judge can verify whether managers took relevant protection measures when scientific opinions converge. This makes them fully liable. Indeed, the judge will consider that no compliance to some common knowledge is clearly negligence and consequently a fault (Klein (2015)). More interesting is the second case where scientists diverge.
Case 2: Divergent views among scientists
Here
This paper’s main concern is about the understanding of how scientists influence the governance of coastal airports facing the SLR. The point on which we mainly focus on is about the airports managers’ liability and how they should behave facing radical scientific uncertainty. Can they fully believe the European Union and IPCC conclusions about the rise of the sea level that associates a 2°C rise of temperature and a related increase of 1 meter of the sea level around 2100? This means that they consider these values as sufficiently relevant or, in the opposite, should they take also in consideration other scientific views considering that the above benchmarks are too low