The World Court Declares Climate Change an 'Existential Danger'
On Wednesday, the top court of the United Nations said that climate change is a big and clear danger as it began to give its view on what countries should do about it. The advice from the World Court, which isn't a must-follow rule, might shape how the world acts on climate issues from now on.
"Greenhouse gases come for sure from human actions that don't stick to borders," said Judge Yuji Iwasawa. The court was still giving its view and had not yet shared its final thoughts.
Even though it's not a must-follow rule, the talk of the 15 judges at the court in The Hague will still mean a lot in law and politics, and future climate legal cases will have to think about it, say the legal pros. "It's very big; it might be one of the most key legal decisions of our times due to the big matters it deals with, which are at the center of climate fairness," said Joie Chowdhury, a top lawyer at the Center for International Environmental Law.
The U.N. General Assembly had two big asks for the judges: one was what rules do countries have to follow to look after the air from bad gases, and two, what should be done about countries that mess up the air?
Over two weeks last December at the ICJ, rich northern countries said old deals on the air, like the 2015 Paris Agreement, which is not too strict, should set what they need to do.
Poor lands and small island nations said we need tough rules that must be followed to cut down bad air gases and that the big air ruiners should help pay money. Last year, in the latest "Emissions Gap Report," the U.N. told us how countries' plans to fight climate change match what we need. As people push to make firms and governments own up, more and more court cases about the climate have come up, with around 3,000 cases in almost 60 nations, says June data from London's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
A court in Germany in May ended a fight between a farmer from Peru and the big energy firm RWE, but his lawyers and green folk said the fight, even though it took ten years, was still a win for climate cases and might push for more like it. This month, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which has power over 20 Latin American and Caribbean places, noted in another opinion that its members must work together to fight climate change.
People who fight for change say Wednesday's court view should mark a new start, even if the choice itself is just advice. This choice might also help make it simpler for states to check each other on world health problems like dirty air or smoke.
"The court can show that not acting on climate, mainly by big smokemakers, is not just bad planning but a break of world rules," said Fijian Vishal Prasad, a law student who pushed the government of Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean to take the case to the ICJ. Though it's possible to look past an ICJ choice, lawyers say that countries don't like to do that. "This view uses world rules that countries have agreed to," Chowdhury said.
