LEADERS of nine small island states turned to the United Nations maritime court today seeking protection of the world’s oceans from catastrophic climate change that threatened the very existence of entire countries.

The island states were asking the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Itlos) to determine if carbon dioxide emissions absorbed by the oceans can be considered pollution, and if so, what obligations countries have to prevent it.

“This is the opening chapter in the struggle to change the conduct of the international community by clarifying the obligation of states to protect the marine environment,” said Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne.

“The time has come to speak in terms of legally binding obligations rather than empty promises that go unfulfilled,” he told the court based in Hamburg, Germany.

The joint counsel representing the islands, Catherine Amirfar, said the point was to force countries to implement substantive measures against climate change.

“We’re here to discuss what are the necessary, concrete, specific steps that they must take as a matter of law, not political discretion. That’s key and… a big part of the answer,” she told journalists.

Ocean ecosystems create half the oxygen humans breathe and limit global warming by absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities.

But increasing emissions can warm and acidify seawaters, harming marine life.

At the heart of the case is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) that binds countries to prevent pollution of the oceans.

The UN treaty defined pollution as the introduction by humans of “substances or energy into the marine environment” that harmed marine life.

But it did not spell out carbon emissions as a specific pollutant, and the plaintiffs argued these emissions should qualify.

Beyond ‘charity’

The push for climate justice won a big boost in March when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to lay out nations’ obligations on protecting the Earth’s climate and the legal consequences they faced for failing to do so.

The ICJ’s advice was pending but the action opened up a new front to bind countries to pledges on reducing emissions.

The move at the UN was led by Vanuatu, one of the island nations that brought today’s case before the Itlos.

Small islands like Vanuatu are particularly exposed to the impact of global warming, with seawater rises posing an existential threat.

“Just a few years – this is all we have before the ocean consumes everything my people built across centuries,” Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Kausea Natano told the court.

“If international law has nothing to say about an entire country going underwater… then what purpose does it serve?” he said, pleading for a clear direction from the court.

Browne voiced frustration at the attitude of some major nations when it came to funding climate change mitigation or prevention.

When “large polluters contribute towards various funds, they believe it’s an act of charity”, he said at a press conference, adding that a successful outcome would tell them “they have legal obligations”.

Marine heatwave

Concrete measures, said Vanuatu’s attorney-general Arnold Loughman, could include halting deep-sea drilling for oil.

“It’s time to come up with solutions and ways of stopping these countries from continuing to drill,” he said.

Across the two-thirds of the planet covered by seas, nearly 60% of surface waters experienced at least one marine heatwave last year, said the annual State of the Climate report led by scientists from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This was 50% more than pre-industrial levels and “the highest in the modern atmospheric record and in paleoclimate records dating back as far as 800,000 years”, said the report published this month.

The world’s oceans set a new temperature record in August, with average sea surface temperatures reaching 21ºC for over a week, said the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The other island states in the Itlos case were the Bahamas, Niue, Palau, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, while another 34 state parties participated in the court hearing. – AFP, September 11, 2023.