Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194 countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat.

I had been dreading the treaty anniversary as an occasion to note that we have not done nearly enough, but in July I thought we might be able celebrate it. Because, on 23 July, the international court of justice handed down an epochal ruling that gives that treaty enforceable consequences it never had before. It declares that all nations have a legal obligation to act in response to the climate crisis, and, as Greenpeace International put it, “obligates states to regulate businesses on the harm caused by their emissions regardless of where the harm takes place. Significantly, the court found that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental for all other human rights, and that intergenerational equity should guide the interpretation of all climate obligations.” The Paris treaty was cited repeatedly as groundwork for this decision.

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate, said of the decision: “I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity.” Costa Rica’s Christiana Figueres, who presided over the negotiations that created that Paris climate treaty declared, with jubilation, on her podcast: “The reason why I am truly tearful is this is without a doubt, the most far-reaching, the most comprehensive and the most consequential legal opinion we’ve ever had.”

This case that ended in the world’s highest court began with 27 law students in the University of the South Pacific who in 2019, asked themselves what they could do about climate – and it’s not hard to imagine a........

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