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Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Will industrial countries heed ICJ advisory?

by

57 days ago
20250728

The ad­vi­so­ry opin­ion of the In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice (ICJ) re­quir­ing states to ac­knowl­edge and put in­to prac­tice their oblig­a­tions un­der in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate change laws rais­es a mea­sure of hope, par­tic­u­lar­ly for low-ly­ing small is­land states. It is those coun­tries that are most threat­ened by in­un­da­tion from sea wa­ter, which has been surg­ing to­wards and oc­cu­py­ing those states with low-lev­el shore­line is­lands for over a decade.

The ICJ says “an ex­is­ten­tial threat” ex­ists to those states and in­deed the world pop­u­la­tion every­where, as the glac­i­ers melt and plunge in­to the oceans and seas around them. More­over, the world court makes it clear that the “cli­mate oblig­a­tions are not as­pi­ra­tional—they are le­gal, sub­stan­tive, and en­force­able.”

The ef­fect is to say to all coun­tries, more so to the in­dus­tri­al na­tions, which are the ma­jor pol­luters of the at­mos­phere through their fos­sil us­age to man­u­fac­ture and fab­ri­cate con­sumer durables, that they have to go be­yond rhetoric and promis­es made at in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ences.

Un­der the ad­vi­so­ry opin­ion, the re­quire­ment of all states is for them “to co-op­er­ate in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, and up­hold fun­da­men­tal rights in the face of es­ca­lat­ing cli­mate risks.” And just in case there are those coun­tries whose lead­ers feel they are ex­cep­tion­al to the opin­ion, the ICJ makes clear “these du­ties ex­tend to all states, and the cli­mate sys­tem must be pro­tect­ed for present and fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.”

The du­ty of those states is not on­ly to es­tab­lish na­tion­al cli­mate plans un­der the Paris Agree­ment, but they al­so have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to reg­u­late pri­vate ac­tors and pro­vide sup­port to more vul­ner­a­ble na­tions.

The in­ter­na­tion­al court has made it clear to lead­ers who feel their coun­tries are be­yond the re­quire­ment that “in­ac­tion, or fail­ure to act de­ci­sive­ly, may con­sti­tute an in­ter­na­tion­al­ly wrong­ful act—trig­ger­ing con­se­quences un­der the law of state re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.”

As the re­ports of the UN cli­mate sci­en­tists have been stat­ing over the pe­ri­od of in­tense con­cern, the con­tin­u­ing and in­creas­ing re­lease of tox­ic gas­es in­to the at­mos­phere, through the pro­duc­tion of in­dus­tri­al goods us­ing fos­sil fu­els, is en­dan­ger­ing the ex­is­tence of the plan­et. What is worse is that while small-is­land states with low-ly­ing coast­lines are most vul­ner­a­ble, they are not the ma­jor pol­luters.

The crit­i­cal is­sue con­tin­ues to be whether the lead­ers of the in­dus­tri­al states will heed the warn­ing and car­ry out their oblig­a­tions to trans­form their in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion meth­ods.

And while a few in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­ers have re­duced their green­house emis­sions in re­cent times, Chi­na, the Unit­ed States, Rus­sia, In­dia, sev­er­al Eu­ro­pean Union coun­tries and Brazil to­geth­er re­lease 62.7 per cent of the to­tal green­house gas­es.

The bad news con­tin­ues to be that glob­al emis­sions have in­creased by 0.8 per cent, ac­cord­ing to the sci­en­tif­ic pub­li­ca­tion Our World in Da­ta.

It is worth not­ing that im­me­di­ate­ly on his re­turn to of­fice, US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump re­voked mea­sures tak­en by his pre­de­ces­sor to cur­tail ex­ces­sive in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion.

The ques­tion re­mains whether mankind will ul­ti­mate­ly con­vert in large mea­sure to green pro­duc­tion and away from the fos­sil fu­el us­age of the present. Many de­vel­op­ing coun­tries think it’s un­fair to them not to be able to fol­low the pat­tern of in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion which made Eu­rope, Amer­i­ca and parts of Asia wealthy. It is left to be seen, there­fore, if the main cul­prits will make the ad­just­ment for the bet­ter­ment of the en­tire world.


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