Yesterday, the International Court of Justice began to hear the largest climate case in its 80-year history. Almost 100 countries will share submissions before the World Court as judges seek to establish “the obligations of States in respect of climate change.”
Led by a coalition of small island states, the hearings mark the culmination of five years of collective campaigning initiated by Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change to take ‘the world’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court’.
“This may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity. Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, as he opened proceedings in The Hague this morning.
Vanuatu – where sea levels have risen by 6 millimetres every year since 1993 – faces the risk of total submersion by the end of this century without meaningful climate action. “Unrelenting natural disasters have flung the nation into a near constant state of emergency,” Progressive International Council member Julian Aguon told the Court.
“This Sisyphean task of responding to climate disasters has left the country simply unable to pursue its aspirations for sustainable development and has forced the government to take on substantial debt, thereby inducing dependency. These constraints together with the degradation and destruction of the nation’s natural resources sharply curtail Vanuatu’s ability to self-govern and freely determine its economic, social and cultural development.”
Worse is yet to come. Last month, an international team of researchers released preliminary findings that show the forests, soils and oceans that have quietly absorbed humanity's excess carbon are now breaking down. These natural carbon sinks absorbed almost no CO2. Meanwhile, 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record.
In Baku, Azerbaijan, COP29 comprehensively failed to address the urgency of this crisis. Of the $1.3 trillion of climate finance that independent experts estimate will be required annually by 2030, the UN climate conference agreed to provide just $300bn every year – by 2035. This is hardly a surprise given the fact that fossil fuel lobbyists received more passes to COP29 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.
It is against this backdrop of crippling institutional failure that the small island states have now turned to the World Court.
As the founding declaration of the Progressive International states, humanity faces a choice: internationalism or extinction. The crises of our century threaten the extinction of all life in all nations across all continents.
As the world’s wealthiest countries peddle neo-colonial false solutions and accelerate their extraction, those who bear the least responsibility for the climate crisis are facing its most devastating consequences. Internationalism is not a luxury. It is a strategy for survival.
It is in this spirit that I will be reporting live from The Hague as this case develops over the coming weeks.
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In solidarity,
Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla
Co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International
