The Fight for Climate Justice at the World Court

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There is no English equivalent for the word the women of Yakel use to describe the shame they feel when they are unable to carry out their customary duties. It is not exactly embarrassment. It is not simply sorrow. It is something deeper — a rupture between the self and the sacred. For generations, the women of Yakel, a kastom (custom) village on the island of Tanna in the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, have borne the responsibility for the ritual of Nahunu. Nahunu entails the preparation of food and drink for the Imalul, or the spiritual center of the village, where the people go to commune with their ancestors. This responsibility, though heavy, is not a burden. It is a birthright. A form of spiritual service. To perform it is to be in right relationship — with the land, with one another, and with the ancestral realm. To fail is to feel adrift, untethered from a deeper order, like a reed cut from a reed bed.

And yet, through no fault of their own, they are failing. The gardens that once grew nearby have been blighted by landslides and battered by storms — disasters now far more frequent and intense due to climate change. The women report having to climb down one side of a steep mountain, cross a frequently flooded ravine, and climb back up the other side to reach the arable lands where their relocated gardens are planted — a journey that can take an entire day. Often they do not make it back before sunset. Often they return empty-handed. On those days, the ritual is missed, the spiritual connection is broken, and the women grow increasingly distressed. Meanwhile, hunger has grown so severe that families have been forced to eat the animals once reserved for sacred ceremonies, deepening the destruction of customary life. With every missed or incomplete ceremony, the feeling of alienation grows. For the women in particular, this combination of extreme physical labor and emotional strain has led to strokes and premature death.

Yam is so much more than a crop in Yakel. It is ceremony, calendar, covenant. It is ancestor. It organizes everything from governance to the seasons themselves. Yam ceremonies mark when children come of age, when marriages occur, when the dead are honored. The loss of the yam is thus not merely a loss of a foodstuff but a collapse of Indigenous methods of timekeeping, storytelling, and social coherence. Its absence disrupts all manner of communal life. Its absence means certain ceremonies cannot be performed, including the Toka, the four-day dance by which the community chooses a high chief.

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In Yakel, there has not been a single successful yam harvest in four years.

I should pause here to say that when our team visited Yakel, it was not as journalists or researchers. We went as lawyers — from Blue Ocean Law, the firm that represented Vanuatu in the historic advisory opinion proceedings on climate change before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). These proceedings were the result of a long and herculean diplomatic campaign spearheaded by Vanuatu and supported by states and civil society organizations around the world, chief among them the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, who rallied behind the call to “bring the world’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court.”

For the past five years, our team, together with a small pool of external counsel, helped shape the legal strategy behind the case, draft the legal question referred to the court by the United Nations General Assembly, and prepare Vanuatu’s written and oral submissions. We also represented the Melanesian Spearhead Group and the Organisation of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States in these same proceedings — each bringing its own voice to the call for climate justice.

As part of our preparatory work, members of our team spent months traveling with our clients across Melanesia — to Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, and beyond — gathering testimony from those living on the frontlines of the climate crisis, which we would put forward as evidence of the harm already caused by the conduct driving climate change. While each of these countries is home to peoples with rich and diverse cultures, Melanesian communities are united by deep, place-based relationships. What is happening in all of these communities proves that irreparable climate harm is already here, and that it is being unjustly borne by those who contributed the least to the problem, and whose voices have long been excluded from the places where power resides. Places like The Hague, where the ICJ sits.

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This essay is for them. This case was for them. What comes after should be too.

BEFORE MOVING DEEPER into the legal arguments, it is necessary to explain what is at stake in this case. For those outside the community of international lawyers who worked on it, the issues may seem abstract or remote. They are not. At its core, this case asks the court to clarify how existing principles of international law apply to the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced: climate change.

Specifically, the court has been asked to clarify two things: first, the legal obligations of states under international law to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases; and second, the legal consequences for states whose acts or omissions have caused significant harm — particularly to small island developing states, other especially vulnerable countries, peoples, and future generations. That is, what do states that have caused the climate crisis owe to the victims of this crisis?

These are not academic inquiries. They implicate multiple bodies of law already binding on states. Customary international law imposes a duty to prevent transboundary environmental harm, including by exercising due diligence to regulate activities that pose foreseeable risks, such as greenhouse gas emissions. It also protects the right of all peoples to self-determination, which is enshrined in the United Nations Charter and other treaties. Human rights law obligates states to refrain from conduct that impairs rights deemed essential to human dignity, such as the rights to life, food, water, health, and housing. All of these rights are imperiled by climate degradation. The right to self-determination, for example, is undermined not only by the loss of land to sea level rise, but also by the unraveling of self-determined ways of life. Under international law, states owe these and other duties to present and future generations. Yet a number of them have wrecked the climate system in the face of evidence that doing so could result in massive, unprecedented human rights violations.

The core of our argument is simple: Climate change is not occurring in a legal vacuum. It is unfolding against a backdrop of existing legal rules — rules that have been flouted by a small minority of recalcitrant states who refuse to bring their behavior into conformity with what climate science (and the law) requires. Despite arguments to the contrary, climate treaties like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement do not displace the broader universe of binding legal obligations. Those treaties supplement, but do not supplant, the wider corpus of international law applicable to climate change.

All this to say, the architecture is already there. What has been lacking all these years is a clear, authoritative statement from the world’s highest court that the conduct responsible for climate change — acts and omissions resulting in dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions — breaches these obligations. That is what this case is about.

I should note that Vanuatu spearheaded this campaign with courage and a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes. It knew the risks. It knew that a handful of powerful states would resist any effort to clarify the legal obligations owed: to other states, to vulnerable peoples, and to future generations. Still, Vanuatu forged ahead, rallying support from fellow climate vulnerable countries from the Pacific, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. These states supported Vanuatu in the negotiation and championing of the U.N. General Assembly resolution referring the legal question to the ICJ, which was adopted by consensus in March 2023 in a diplomatic feat of epic proportions.

When the court opened oral arguments in December 2024, that unity held. There, in the Great Hall of Justice, an even broader coalition of states — spanning Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific — rose to reaffirm the key arguments Vanuatu and its allies had advanced: that international law has long imposed binding obligations to prevent environmental harm; that human rights frameworks continue to require all states to cooperate to address climate vulnerability and correct underlying inequities; that the right to self-determination is being violated by man-made climate disruption; that future generations are rights holders whose interests the law must protect; and, finally, that those states that have contributed most to the climate crisis must face consequences for breaching their obligations under the aforementioned bodies of law. Indeed, an unprecedented number of participants appeared before the court, with 97 states and 11 international organizations making statements. Many of them had never before appeared before the court. But they came in record numbers to ensure their voices, and the voices of their peoples, were heard.

Yet even as most of the world rallied behind the call for climate justice, a handful of states sought to dilute it. They argued that climate change is too politically sensitive and that the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement already suffice, thereby excluding application of other sources of law to the issue of climate change. They cautioned the court against interfering in matters they portrayed as better left to political negotiation. Among those pressing this view were the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, and Saudi Arabia.

These arguments represent a misreading of the law as well as a failure to grasp that law is often called upon to speak precisely when politics fails. The no-harm rule does not dissolve because multiple parties contribute to the injury. The duty to respect human rights does not vanish because enforcement is difficult. The right to self-determination does not evaporate because an island nation has been submerged beneath the sea. The law must be applied to the facts — even if those facts present new challenges. Novelty does not negate responsibility.

What these states fear is not judicial overreach. It is accountability. A clear opinion from the court would strengthen the legal arguments available to frontline communities seeking redress. It would shift the narrative from one of voluntary pledges to one of binding obligations and accountability for past failure to take those obligations seriously. For major historical emitters, it would expose the yawning gap between their supposed allegiance to international law and their conduct over time.

For decades, major emitting states have failed to take the necessary action to prevent climate harm, while at the same time subsidizing and expanding the industries driving it. These acts and omissions, taken together, constitute what international law calls a composite act: a pattern of conduct that, over time, breaches obligations. Like any breach of international law, these breaches trigger duties of cessation and reparation, among others.

It is the hope of many that the court will articulate the legal consequences of breaches in the clearest terms, for this is where the greatest potential for meaningful change lies. Cessation is about stopping the harm — reducing emissions, regulating polluting industries, removing the subsidies that prop up fossil fuels. But stopping the harm is not enough. Reparation demands an honest accounting for damage already done. This can take several forms: restitution, which aims to restore what was lost; compensation, where damage is permanent and cannot be undone; and satisfaction, which offers recognition when the harm is more intangible, such as the collapse of cultural practices.

To be clear, the wretched of the earth are not asking for charity. They are demanding justice. International law, if it is to have any meaning, must answer that demand.

Vanuatu made this point plain. Reparations are not symbolic. They are a legal and moral imperative. Climate reparations, then, is nothing more than the logical and legal consequence of applying international law to the conduct responsible for climate change. Moreover, as the Melanesian Spearhead Group argued, climate reparations must be defined on the terms of the victims themselves.

THE TESTIMONIES OUR TEAM gathered across Melanesia confirm that climate change is not a distant threat but a present-day catastrophe — one that has already uprooted communities, unraveled cultures, and upended entire ways of life.

In Papua New Guinea’s Kikori River Delta, the sea is swallowing all traces of a people’s existence. In the village of Veraibari, rising tides have overrun old graveyards, disinterring ancestral remains. Coconut groves have been devoured, ceremonial grounds destroyed. It is a deeply sobering fact that the people of Veraibari have already moved four times due to sea level rise. Each move pushed them farther inland, away from the lands that once gave meaning to their lives. They lost their homes and schools and health clinics. They lost their sources of food and fresh water. They lost their long houses and their spirit trees too. In other words, the displacement they have experienced is not just about the loss of land, but also the loss of the social and spiritual structures that bind them — to each other and to those that came before. Their world, once meticulously tended, is collapsing under the weight of forces entirely beyond their control. As I write this, they are in the midst of a fifth and final relocation. Final because there is simply no more inland left to go.

In Fiji, Vunidogoloa made history when it became the first village to undertake a full-scale government-facilitated relocation. After rising seas and saltwater intrusion made life along the coast impossible, these villagers moved inland to a new site, which they named Kenani — after Canaan, the Biblical promised land. It was meant to symbolize hope, a new beginning. But the move came at a cost. Besides their homes and gardens, these villagers left behind the graves of their deceased family members — graves now frequently submerged at high tide. At the new site, the community, especially the elderly, have struggled to adjust to their surroundings. Several elders said that moving was like dying. Their collective testimony revealed that relocation was not so much deliverance as endurance. If Kenani does indeed denote hope, it is the kind carried not in the heart but on the back. The kind that found corporeal form in the brittle bodies of the old men and women who, for weeks after the move, walked back down to the coast — to weep at the graves of their beloved.

In the Malaita Province of Solomon Islands, Hilary Fioru, a 48-year-old man from the fishing village of Lilisiana, spoke of how storm surges and sea level rise have already toppled a number of traditional practices. “Our way of communal fishing is no longer being practiced in our village,” he said, because “our e’re are destroyed.” The e’re — traditional fishing grounds that once fed the community and anchored its way of life — have been inundated. With the loss of these grounds, women have stopped weaving the coconut nets traditionally used with this fishing method. The coconut trees, too, are dying. As is the Dalo tree — whose wood is used to build canoes. “I feel sad to lose [these] practices, practices that used to unite and hold our community and people together,” Hilary said. “It is devastating.”

In New Caledonia, a non-self-governing French territory whose Indigenous Kanak people are represented by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, Kanak communities spoke of the marine environment as if in mourning. Elders spoke of the shark as kin. The whale as well. Jean-Yves Poedi — a man from Ajie Arho who serves as the Referent for the Sea to the Kanak Customary Senate — explained that in the Kanak world, there are clans of the sea and clans of the mountain. He himself belongs to a sea clan and therefore owes certain obligations to the ocean, specifically to the shark, whom he lovingly described as his “first ancestor.” The shark, he said, is both messenger and guardian — a relative whose presence has long guided his people. He did not delve into detail, noting, “[s]ome knowledge is too sacred to share.” But he did make clear that the ocean is emptying. Already, certain fish and crustacean species have disappeared. Sharks too are seen less and less. With each disappearance, it is not only life that is lost, but lineage — a fraying of the cosmological connections that bind the Kanak people to their world.

THESE ARE NOT peripheral cultural details. They are examples of high-functioning legal orders. Indigenous communities have long maintained sophisticated biocultural systems governed by principles of sustainability and accountability — principles international law claims to champion.

In Melanesia, and indeed the broader Pacific, these governance systems are astonishing in their depth and precision. In Vanuatu, for instance, the celestial cue for planting yam is the rising of the star cluster Matariki (the Pleiades or Seven Sisters) in the east just after sunset. This moment is marked by other ecological signs, including the flowering of the narara tree and the arrival of humpback whales. With the planting of the yam comes a tabu on nearshore fisheries, allowing fish stocks to replenish. And the Pacific is not exceptional. Indigenous communities around the world maintain finely tuned seasonal calendars linking the rhythm of their lives to a range of ecological indicators.

These worldviews are often described — at least by outsiders — as examples of environmental stewardship. But that framing falls short. These systems are less about managing natural resources and more about upholding a covenant of care between people and place. They reflect an ethos reinforced by systems of observation, adaptation, and restraint, one in which human beings are part of the natural world, rather than above it. This ethos is embedded in Melanesian languages themselves. In Fiji, for instance, the word “vanua” means both “land” and “people.” When Indigenous Fijians, or iTaukei, speak of their lands, they almost always say, “na qau vanua,” which translates not to “my land,” but rather “the land to which I belong.” In this light, the framework of environmental stewardship is not only inapposite but rudimentary. At the very least, it represents a failure of imagination.

If international law is to meet the needs of this moment, it must learn to recognize that Indigenous Peoples have long practiced governance systems which are more sophisticated, more sustainable, and more morally coherent than the prevailing frameworks now failing our world. One way it can do this is through the prism of cultural rights and self-determination, which effectively protect these governance systems from external threats, and which can be easily elaborated upon in the climate context.

An ICJ advisory opinion is not legally binding in the way a judgment in a contentious case would be, but it nevertheless carries great legal weight and moral authority. Past advisory opinions have shaped international norms, emboldened courts, and guided multilateral institutions. A strong opinion in this case could do the same — informing future legal action, strengthening climate diplomacy, and supporting claims for reparations. While the opinion will not deliver reparations or reduce emissions overnight, it could chart the legal terrain on which those fights can finally be won.

IN YAKEL, THE RITUAL of Nahunu is completed when the women bring the food to the Imalul — the heart of the village. It is not a solitary act, but a gathering — of hands, of hearts, of histories.

This case, and the yearslong legal struggle behind it, is no different.

It is not the story of one. It is the story of many.

The many who carried their sacred knowledge like stones — crossing rivers, climbing mountains, risking everything, even ancestral wrath, for speaking what custom forbade — to tell the truth.