Air Date: Week of May 29, 2026

Pictured above are destroyed boats at the BP wharf in Vanuatu after Cyclone Pam struck the island in 2015. According to a report from ReliefWeb, estimates say that 95 percent of crops were destroyed in the affected areas, leaving communities food insecure. (Photo: Graham Crumb, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

More than two-thirds of U.N. members recently voted in favor of a resolution affirming a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice that countries have a legal obligation to limit global warming. While this advisory opinion is not enforceable, it will likely be cited in lawsuits and appeals as a fact in the fight against climate disruption. Inside Climate News reporter Bob Berwyn speaks with Host Jenni Doering about the significance of the ruling and its U.N. adoption.

Transcript

CURWOOD: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering.

141 nations, that’s more than two thirds of UN members, have now formally affirmed a landmark high court ruling on climate change.
In 2025 the International Court of Justice, or ICJ found that countries have an international legal obligation to limit global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Though not enforceable, this ruling will likely be cited in lawsuits and appeals as a fact in the fight against climate disruption.

CURWOOD: Just eight nations voted against the UN resolution supporting the ICJ opinion, including Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States, which is the only country that has backed out of the UN Paris Agreement. In their 2025 opinion, all fifteen judges found that every country is responsible for any climate related harms it inflicts on others, even if it withdraws from treaties like the Paris Agreement. As it voted “no” the US complained the resolution “makes alarmist political statements.”

DOERING: In recent days, though, the planet’s vital signs have been flashing red as Europe and Southeast Asia swelter under record-breaking heat. Bob Berwyn, a reporter for our media partner Inside Climate News, is following the story and he joins us now. Welcome back to Living on Earth Bob!

BERWYN: Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here.

DOERING: So, let's go back to this advisory opinion on climate change from the International Court of Justice, who brought that issue to the ICJ, and why?

BERWYN: The campaign started with a group of students in the Pacific Islands region in 2019 and they started a grassroots push, and then got some governments involved. First and foremost, the government of Vanuatu, which then championed this request to the ICJ, and did the hard work of building a political coalition at the United Nations to get the general assembly to request the advisory opinion from the court. And why they did it, there's a few different reasons, and if you think back to 2019, it was the height of the climate movement. And there were marches every week, Fridays for Future marches, millions of young people, not just young people on the streets nearly every week all over the world. And this group of students saw that energy and thought, wow, how can we focus that into something even more concrete than just turning people out on the street. And in talking to one of the organizers there, the underlying thought was they were kind of looking at the world — they're all from countries that are really being ravaged by climate change already, they're losing land to the sea, arable land, some villages have had to relocate, salt water is intruding into drinking systems, they're literally being consumed by rising sea level from global warming — and they thought to themselves: in what world can it be fair that a handful, really a tiny minority of very rich countries, did this damage all over the world to hundreds of countries that really had no responsibility for that damage and not be held accountable for that. So that's what kind of was their deep motivation for seeking this advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice.

DOERING: Yeah, and so the International Court of Justice did conclude that countries have a legal responsibility to act to prevent the climate crisis from worsening. Of course, it was an advisory opinion, it's not necessarily a legally binding opinion, but why did they come to that conclusion?

BERWYN: I think it's important to realize that they didn't really invent any new law from scratch. They reviewed existing international law, human rights treaties, different environmental laws, the Paris Agreement, ocean laws, and just longstanding legal principles about preventing harm across borders, even without a specific law in any one country, there's just a longstanding international norm that generally countries should act in a way that whatever they do in their own country doesn't harm any other countries outside of their borders. And this 15 judge panel also included a lot of scientific evidence. They looked at IPCC reports, the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They had a briefing with experts from a research group called the World Weather Attribution, which looks at links between global warming and different climate extremes, and can estimate by studying those how global warming made them worse, or stronger hurricanes, or more intense rainfall, and they took testimony, they took testimony from hundreds of people and thousands of written pages, statements from people who are being affected by climate change, and then they mulled it over, as a high court often does, and I think it's important to remember that this is a 15 judge panel and these are some of the top legal minds from countries from all over the world, from every continent, with vastly different legal systems, and some are from conservative countries that have a stake in producing fossil fuels. Nonetheless, these 15 judges all came to find unanimously that under all these existing laws they applied that to climate and said clearly: countries have obligations to avoid harms from climate-polluting gasses, just like other harms. Just like you can't go pull your ship into some other country's harbor and start dumping out sewage water, you can't just dump your waste product into the atmosphere either — that's basically what they're saying — without consequences.

DOERING: And how specific did they get in this advisory opinion? You know, did they prescribe any steps that nations need to take?

BERWYN: They don't have the power to prescribe steps or to punish somebody or to call somebody in and, you know, order them to explain themselves. That's not really the way it works. They pointed out that, according to the best understanding of all applicable environmental laws and treaties internationally, that countries have a duty to try and avoid that harm, and said that if they don't, that potentially they could be held responsible for that, not by the ICJ, but by another court, or depending on how the future legal landscape evolves. You know, legal frameworks don't just instantly, you don't just have a decision and then it's all there, right? We operate in the US on a constitution that's 250 years old, and we still weekly have arguments over words in that constitution about what they actually mean.

DOERING: Yeah.

BERWYN: And international laws is somewhat the same, and I described it in a story I wrote about this as a legal structure, a legal framework like this being a bit like a coral reef with different accretions being added on to each other and building a strong structure that eventually becomes strong enough to change the currents around it. And that's what's emerging, not just with this ICJ case. I think it was pretty clear all the people that were involved in that celebrated the vote at the UN, and the opinion as a step forward to climate action. They said this isn't a silver bullet, this isn't going to stop climate change. It's another step in a long process of building a new legal framework that hopefully will allow countries to get a better handle on climate pollution.

DOERING: The International Court of Justice opinion was just recently affirmed by the UN General Assembly. Some 141 member states voted yes to say we do agree with this advisory opinion. What exactly happened there?

BERWYN: So the General Assembly requested the advisory opinion to begin with, and that's happened in other areas of international jurisprudence or law as well, and then after the International Court of Justice releases something like that, it's sort of customary that the UN look at it again now that what they asked for has been delivered and had some debates on it, and then looked for a vote to welcome this opinion from the court and to incorporate it into the whole kind of United Nations governance structure as much as possible.

DOERING: And so what does incorporating it mean?

BERWYN: There's a couple of good specific examples. Some countries are already referring to the advisory opinion as they submit new climate targets to the Paris process, to the ongoing UN process, and I'm sure when they meet, for example, in six months at COP in Turkey at the annual climate conference, there will be a lot of discussion of the ICJ advisory opinion. It was pretty new at the last COP in Brazil, so people were talking about it a little bit, but I would say that people who offer thoughts on negotiations there will have to consider this new opinion, and if what they're proposing is consistent with what the advisory opinion says.

DOERING: Yeah, and Bob, the opinion states that countries are legally obligated to prevent the climate crisis from getting worse, but you know we have seen the international community fail on legal obligations time and time again when it comes to human rights, so what does legally obligated mean in this case? And how can courts hold countries accountable when it comes to this part of the law?

BERWYN: Right, ICJ can't send climate violators to jail or force government to shut down oil fields or coal burning power plants, they just don't have the power to do that. There's no international authority that can do that, but it could potentially strengthen lawsuits. There's a lawsuit in Holland right now in the Netherlands against Shell Oil Company, and they were ordered by a lower court to reduce their emissions 45% by 2050 and then an appeals court overturned that, and right now it's in front of the Netherlands Supreme Court, and for sure before that case is over, somebody's going to mention, or already has, the ICJ advisory opinion saying, "look, there's a body of international law out there that exists, and was just sort of affirmed by the UN that you can't just keep polluting without consequence, you have to reduce your emissions." Whether or not the Netherlands Supreme Court in that case takes that to heart or mentions it in a decision remains to be seen. I would expect to see some international court rulings over the next couple of years that very clearly call on the ICJ resolution and highlight it and mention it when they make a decision on a particular climate case.

DOERING: Bob Berwyn is a reporter for our media partner, Inside Climate News, and he's based in Austria. Thank you so much, Bob.

BERWYN: Thank you for having me.

 

Links

Inside Climate News | “A Youth-Led Campaign Claims a Win For Climate Justice”

Inside Climate News | “U.N. General Assembly Embraces Court Opinion That Says Nations Have a Legal Obligation to Take Climate Action”