Five years ago, a group of 27 law students at the University of the South Pacific came together and hatched a bold new plan to bring the issue of climate justice before the United Nations’ top court.

Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change was born, and the youth-led group quickly grew to include more than 100 members from countries across the South Pacific. They were tired of world leaders failing to take aggressive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions and thereby fueling a climate crisis that disproportionately harms Pacific Island communities.

The law students decided to turn to international humanitarian law as a potential remedy, successfully rallying leaders of Pacific states to request an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on states’ legal obligations to prevent devastation wreaked by climate change. The opinion would set forth consequences for countries that violate human rights by causing significant harm to the world’s climate. In March 2023, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution, spearheaded by the nation of Vanuatu, calling on the ICJ to issue the advisory opinion — the first time such a resolution has been passed with consensus.

The ICJ began public hearings at The Hague on December 2. Over the course of two weeks, the court will hear arguments from more than 100 countries and international organizations, including youth-led organizations and Indigenous groups, about what states are obligated to do to ensure the environment’s habitability and mitigate the climate crisis. While an ICJ advisory opinion is nonbinding, it marks the first time the UN’s highest court has been asked to clarify nations’ legal responsibility to prevent climate change.

Humanitarian groups have highlighted how the dangerous planetary temperature rise spurred by fossil fuel extraction threatens a range of fundamental human rights, including the right to health, food, housing and even life. Since 1850, rich countries, especially the United States, have contributed a disproportionate share of greenhouse gas emissions, while poorer countries are left to grapple with the climate crisis’s most devastating impacts.

Ahead of the hearings, the Center for International Environmental Law released a report outlining the human rights and legal basis for states and corporations to provide reparations for harm caused by the climate crisis. While the ICJ hearings mark a historic development, as the report outlines, it isn’t the first time that an international body has weighed in on the legal obligations of states and corporations to mitigate climate harm.

“Under international law, those whose human rights are violated have a right to remedy, including full reparation for climate-related harms,” the report’s authors wrote. “Existing national, regional, and international reparation........

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