Victor DAVID

Dr. Victor DAVID is a Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). 
After spending several years in New Caledonia and Martinique, he is currently posted at the Institut Méditerranéen de Biodiversité et d’Ecologie (IMBE) in Marseille, France. His research activities and expertise focus on the evolution of environmental law and the rights of Nature. 

Previously he worked on the law of and political strategies of adaptation to climate change in the South Pacific and the legal protection of environmentally displaced people in Oceania and the geopolitics of Oceania. He participated in a French ANR project (CESAR) on the legal aspects of the sargassum crisis in the French territories in the Caribbean and in another one on law and pesticide cocktails. He holds an LL.B and Masters in English literature, political science and legal anthropology. He has completed his doctoral thesis in Law and Social Sciences on Law and environmental policy in New Caledonia at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He already has a significant number of publications and participation in scientific conferences to his credit. DAVID Victor began his career in the administration of ORSTOM / IRD (Dakar, Brazzaville, Paris and Nouméa) before becoming Deputy Secretary General of the Congress of New Caledonia (2001) and later in 2007 CEO of a semi-public company that pioneered in household waste management in the Greater Nouméa. He returned to IRD in Jan. 2011 reorienting to a full time career in research and expertise. He continues to coordinate the public-participation and scientific research based adoption of the Loyalty Islands Province Environment Code project in New Caledonia. He is also currently working through a Voluntary Commitment to the UN Ocean Conference on the feasibility study on the Rights of the Pacific Ocean as a legal Entity (#OceanAction41675). Since June 2022, he is also coordinating the Merméd Project, a Voluntary Commitment to the UN Ocean Conference to study the feasibility of recognising the Mediterranean Sea as a legal entity. #OceanAction46735;

 Dr. David was an Expert Member of the IPBES Capacity Building Task Force (2019-2023). He is currently an Associate Researcher of the Observatoire International des Droits de la Nature (IORN) based in Montreal. In 2022, on the invitation of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MENSUR) he participates in an IRD expertise on the creation of a regional scientific Observatory on the Environment and Climate Change in Djibouti. More details on the Linkedin personal pages.