The world is one step closer to holding countries to account for their actions imperiling climate stability. On July 23, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) provided a response to a question brought forth in 2023 by an international coalition of students who asked what is owed to nations and peoples navigating the front lines of the climate crisis.

“It’s a really critical and historic opinion,” said Anjli Parrin, a Kenyan lawyer and director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “[I]t’s thinking about what is to come, which is extremely exciting and quite revolutionary for a court that traditionally does not take big leaps of faith.”

The landmark ruling outlines that the United Nations’ 193 member states, which include the U.S., have obligations to address greenhouse gas emissions, take action to protect the life-giving climate system, and adhere to agreements around loss and damage funds, the core component of international climate mitigation and reparations payments. States also have an obligation to phase out their production, consumption, and subsidization of fossil fuels as soon as possible. 

“[This is an] existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life,” the justices wrote. “States have obligations under international human rights law to respect, protect, and ensure the effective enjoyment of human rights by taking necessary measures to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment.”

Still, it’s unclear what bearing the unanimous ruling will have on the U.S., one of the world’s largest polluters. The U.S., which often operates above international human rights law, is also undergoing a significant backlash against climate science and regulations. 

A binding resolution 

In 2019, 27 student activists from small island nations led by those in the southwestern Pacific Ocean country of Vanuatu asked the ICJ to issue an advisory opinion on two primary questions: What are the obligations of member states under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system, and what are the legal consequences under these obligations for member states where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the climate system? In 2023, the U.N. legal body agreed to hear arguments, and over two weeks in December 2024, 96 states and 11 organizations provided testimony. 

The sea level rise experienced by Vanuatu and its people is twice that of other places around the world, yet its contributions to atmosphere-warming toxins is negligible in comparison. Even with substantive climate action, the people of Vanuatu face existential disrepair of their culture, as food, education, and language systems are at risk of being swallowed by the ocean. The ocean is the world’s biggest carbon sink, but even if all emissions were to halt today, sea levels would still rise significantly, and even one foot of sea level rise could be catastrophic. 

The unanimous advisory opinion by the court’s 15 justices is a binding resolution for nation states party to the Paris Agreement, Kyoto Protocol, Vienna Convention, and other international agreements aimed at coordinating emissions reductions and climate action plans. 

The opinion comes after an earlier July ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which found that every person has a human right to a stable climate system. The ICJ ruling also follows decades of ineffectual Conference of Parties conventions and international meetings aimed at addressing climate change consequences, providing room for international cooperation and mitigating harms already experienced by many impoverished countries. 

Exactly what the consequences of the ruling will be for the U.S.—which is not party to the Paris Agreement, Kyoto Protocol, Vienna Convention, or the U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea, and ostensibly the world’s biggest climate polluter—remains to be seen. But Parrin is hopeful that the ICJ ruling makes it more difficult for the U.S. to contravene international human rights law. The ruling may also provide harmed member states the legal foregrounding to take the U.S. to court. She noted that the U.S. is still obligated to components of the ruling underpinned by international human rights law, such as protecting an individual’s right to a clean and healthful environment, even if it’s not a party to certain treaties. 

With this ruling, international law is far ahead of the undermining of domestic measures to address climate harms. Just one week following the ICJ’s ruling, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a regulatory change that undermines a key component of climate regulatory law and framework in the U.S.

Known as the “endangerment finding,” the 2009 standard outlined by the agency’s Climate Change Division articulates that greenhouse gas emissions can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. In recent weeks, the Trump administration laid off thousands of EPA employees, slashed funding for environmental justice programs, collaborated with corporations like Elon Musk’s xAI to exploit community resources, dismantled core pieces of climate information resources like the federal government’s vulnerability assessment tool known as EJ Screen, and cut funding for federal agencies that respond to extreme climate events. It’s unclear if, by U.S. and international law, the American government will maintain its ability to contribute with impunity to the climate crisis. 

While the ruling does not guarantee that the U.S. is held to account for its emissions or their impact, the shift in judicial thinking may influence how American judges view domestic climate cases. Until this point, only one case, Held v. Montana, has gone to trial and resulted in a win for youth plaintiffs. Other cases at the state level and one lawsuit against the federal government were thrown out largely because of what judges said was either a lack of constitutional standing or appropriateness for the court’s venue—that climate change is a policy issue, not a legal one. 

To that end, the ICJ noted that the legal world is not the only place where significant change can or should occur. Justices wrote that a “lasting and satisfactory solution requires human will and wisdom—at the individual, social and political levels—to change our habits, comforts and current way of life in order to secure a future for ourselves and those who are yet to come.”

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

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