Last year, the International Court of Justice unanimously ruled that countries have a legal obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The decision was the culmination of a years-long campaign launched by a group of law students in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.
The landmark opinion, which said countries’ failure to address emissions from fossil fuels and other sources could carry legal consequences, provides a potentially powerful new tool for communities, organizations, or governments suing in national courts to compel climate action or win damages. It could also push international climate negotiators toward a more aggressive stance on a danger the judges called “urgent and existential.”
Julian Aguon, an Indigenous Chamorro human rights lawyer from Guam, wore a garland of coconut fronds and cowry shells as he argued Vanuatu’s case in The Hague. He and his colleagues had traveled across Melanesia and Micronesia to gather testimony from residents whose homes, cultures, and livelihoods are being devastated by climate change.
While the impact of climate change is typically measured in degrees of warming, feet of flooding, or monetary losses, for many Indigenous people it is inflicting a profound cultural, spiritual, and emotional injury that the sterile language of science and economics fails to capture, said Aguon, founder of the Guam-based Indigenous rights and environmental justice firm Blue Ocean Law. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he said that highlighting the harms Indigenous peoples and cultures are suffering proved a potent legal strategy at the United Nations’ main judicial body.
“Climate change is unraveling the very terms by which people know themselves and keep covenant with the natural world.” In the ICJ case, he said, “we brought that to the court’s attention because these are rights violations of the highest order — violations of the right to life, the right to culture, the right to self-determination.”
Julian Aguon addressing the International Court of Justice in December 2024. International Court of Justice
Yale Environment 360: Can you tell me about the testimonies you and your colleagues gathered when you traveled to Vanuatu, Fiji, and other island nations in preparation for the case? How did they shape your arguments in court?
Julian Aguon: There’s no way to translate the urgency and gravity of the climate crisis other than via firsthand accounts of loss and damage, so we wanted to foreground vulnerable communities’ experiences. The process revealed in spectacular ways just how emaciated the global discourse on climate harms is. The harms aren’t just environmental, and people who speak in that limited frame don’t know anything about what’s happening in the Pacific. It’s a collapse of cultural traditions that stretch back millennia and have sustained life in these islands for thousands and thousands of years.
In Yakel village [in Vanuatu], many ceremonies revolve around the yam, which is the most important root crop. Some of the ceremonies haven’t been performed in years because there hasn’t been a successful yam harvest. For example, there’s an elaborate four-day dance by which the people choose their high chief. And they’re unable to perform this dance because of the yam’s absence.
That all causes an enormous amount of stress and distress, and it affects the ability to pass on to future generations these cultural teachings, which are place-based. Because these are cultures that have grown out of a particular piece of soil, they’re tied to their place and the life in it. So we’re talking about a massive rupture to culture and to cosmologies. And the vocabulary of environmental damage, because it remains so one-dimensional and flat, and largely borrowed from Western frameworks, fails to capture the true gravity and the true nature of the harm that climate change is causing.
“In Veraibari, in Papua New Guinea, people have already moved four times due to sea level rise.”
E360: Pacific island nations are experiencing twice the global rate of sea level rise. For many, the threat is existential. Tuvalu’s prime minister has noted that 50 percent of his country will be regularly underwater by 2050. What did you hear about this threat in the communities you visited?
Aguon: All over Melanesia, the story was the same. In Veraibari, in Papua New Guinea, people have already moved four times due to sea level rise, [with the village, situated between a river and the sea, relocating to safer ground]. It’s one thing to talk about rising seas in terms of the numbers, but it’s something else entirely to hear what it means when you have to move four times, and you’re in the midst of a fifth and final climate-induced relocation [because there is nowhere else to go]. What’s more, people in Veraibari don’t understand themselves as having moved there. According to their cultural teachings, it is one of the birthplaces of humankind. To be forced to keep moving and retreating from your ancestral homeland, which is also, in your cosmology, one of the earliest sites of human civilization — the stakes could not be higher.
E360: How is climate change infringing on the right to self-determination?
Aguon: These island nations struggled for so long to throw off the colonial yoke, to emerge as independent sovereign states. And now all of these self-determined ways of life are being gravely imperiled [by rich countries’ fossil fuel emissions]. It’s the definition of climate injustice, and in some ways it’s the latest iteration of the great game of imperialism, of world-making and world-destroying. It’s laying bare all the same structural inequalities.
The island nation of Tuvalu is highly vulnerable to sea level rise. Mario Tama / Getty Images
E360: Can you explain how the case came about?
Aguon: Basically 27 law students from the Vanuatu campus of the University of the South Pacific rallied behind this call to bring the world’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court. They approached [Vanuatu’s leaders, including] the then-minister of foreign affairs, Ralph Regenvanu, who ran with it, and the government spearheaded a global campaign to get the United Nations General Assembly to refer the legal question to the International Court of Justice. It was a Herculean effort, a really muscular, robust diplomatic campaign. It resulted in this beautiful moment in 2023 when the General Assembly adopted the referral by consensus.
E360: How do you see the opinion’s significance, particularly since it is advisory rather than binding?
Aguon: While it’s technically nonbinding in and of itself, the opinion is an authoritative statement of what the law really is. The court evaluated the legality of the conduct driving climate change, not only under climate treaties like the Paris Agreement and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, but also under a wider body of international law, including international environmental law, human rights law, and the Law of the Sea.
“Indigenous peoples share an absolute insistence on the idea that not everything can be bought and sold.”
The opinion says states have binding legal obligations to address the climate crisis. That dispels the ambiguity that has frustrated global progress. And most importantly, it said breaching those obligations is an “internationally wrongful act.” That gives countries and communities new tools, and it has changed the legal terrain for this fight.
Now we are seeing new waves of climate litigation that seek to really hold the powerful to account, be it a state or a corporation. And it’s going to be something that travels. It will feed contentious cases, like where one state is suing another state, or one frontline community is suing a carbon major. It’s going to filter down into all kinds of legal proceedings at the national and regional level and international level. That’s already happening.
E360: On its website, your law firm says “there is no climate justice without Indigenous leadership.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Aguon: It’s abundantly clear that the imagination that got us into this planetary mess cannot be the one to get us out of it. Indigenous peoples have a different imagination, and they have a lot to say about restoring the right relationship between people and planet.
Indigenous peoples the world over share an absolute insistence on anti-commodification, the idea that not everything can be bought and sold. We understand that our health and the health of the planet are inseparable, that humans are inseparable from the more-than-human world, and the health of one is the health of all. All these things that seem so rudimentary or basic, they’re ideas that clearly are not animating the current world order.
Debris left by Typhoon Bavi in Guam in July. Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP via Getty Images
E360: Can you talk about how that worldview shapes your work on deep-sea mining?
Aguon: The current [U.S.] administration, through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is seeking to expedite deep-sea mining in the waters off American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam. Alongside other organizations, we’re contesting that, and we believe the permitting process the agency envisions violates several federal environmental statutes.
But as a firm, we’re also trying to push newer ideas, arguing that some Indigenous communities here in Micronesia have very unique claims. For example, way-finding communities that have been traversing these oceanic spaces for millennia, they have a very different relationship to the sea. Some of the sacred sites that way-finders have talked about forever in their chants include areas where the U.S. government wants to allow deep-sea mining. These communities also maintain healthy relationships with the more-than-human world, like with certain seabirds, with whales, and other cetaceans that are considered spiritual guides.
These claims don’t sound in administrative law like, “X agency violated Y statute.” We’re saying something much deeper, that certain cultures depend on the health and integrity of the ocean, of the deep-sea environment, and to authorize deep-sea mining in these spaces violates several of their human rights, including the right to culture. What we were talking about earlier happening on land is also happening at sea.
This kind of thinking requires taking a step back to understand that the modern world order we’ve inherited, where everything is about nation-states, is laughable when you use a different timescale. The cultures who have been reared in this part of the world are much older than the United States itself. How do you fit the worldviews and the traditional knowledge systems of ancient civilizations into categories that reflect only the last 200 years? It’s almost an impossible task, but that’s what we need to do to get to where we need to go.