What to Know About a Landmark Court Case

The most important climate case that a lot of people haven’t heard about is playing out this week and next at the International Court of Justice.

The court, based in The Hague, adjudicates disputes between nations and issues advisory opinions on big international legal issues. In this case, the judges have been asked by the United Nations to weigh in on what, exactly, international law requires states to do about climate change, and what should be the consequences for states that harm the climate through actions or omissions.

Representatives from more than 100 countries and organizations are appearing at the court, hoping to influence that opinion.

The countries and activists who campaigned to bring the case are trying to drive home the point that the climate crisis is a dire threat to the human rights of the people around the world who bear the brunt of extreme heat, storms and floods, and that those responsible should be held legally accountable.

“I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity,” Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, Ralph Regenvanu, said in his statement to the court on Monday. “Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”

The back story

The hearings are the result of a campaign led by Vanuatu, a Pacific island country that’s extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. The movement argues that the way nations are trying to address climate change now — though U.N. conferences, like the COP29 summit that recently concluded in Baku, Azerbaijan — has been woefully inadequate.

Vanuatu says that the failure to limit the greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet and contributing to extreme weather and sea level rise constitutes an “ongoing breach of international law” that demands stronger action and reparations.

That the hearings are being held at all is an achievement for the tiny country, which has long punched above its weight in climate diplomacy. But the quest to reach The Hague didn’t start with government officials. Rather, the idea came from a group of law students from Pacific Island countries, who began the campaign in 2019. Their slogan: “We are taking the world’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court!”

The students have stressed the concept of climate justice and sought to focus attention on the voices of those most affected by global warming. Their campaign led to a U.N. General Assembly resolution requesting the advisory opinion from the court.

What’s next

Testimony will continue through Dec. 13 and can be viewed on the U.N. website. The court has also posted the written submissions it received.

The opinion is expected next year. While nonbinding, it could bolster the case for linking human rights and climate change in international legal proceedings, and potentially open the floodgates to more climate litigation around the world.

Campaigners say a strong opinion could also provide powerful ammunition for the most vulnerable countries in international climate negotiations. That possibility has prompted significant pushback from some countries — including the United States, Saudi Arabia and China — which argued in their testimony this week that existing U.N. agreements like the Paris climate accord are sufficient to address global warming.

Margaret L. Taylor, who spoke on behalf of the United States in The Hague on Wednesday, repeatedly extolled that accord as the most appropriate vehicle for international climate action.

Of course, by the time the opinion is issued, the United States may have once again pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that while leaving the accord would be “disgraceful,” the United States generally falls far short of honoring the pact anyway.

“It was really ironic today to hear the U.S. uphold the Paris Agreement so loudly and clearly,” she said. “And yet, the track record has been a series of attempts to undermine the goals of that agreement.”

She added that it was “infuriating” given the impacts of extreme weather on nations like Vanuatu that are bearing the brunt of rising sea levels and more intense storms. “Many of them have contributed the least to the problem,” she said. “And yet the U.S., as the largest contributor to historical emissions, is evading its responsibility.”

THE CLIMATE FIX

Another tool to lock away carbon

The problem: The world will need to remove many millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year from the air to meaningfully limit global warming.

The fix: You can take some kinds of biomass (renewable organic matter like wood and crop residue), heat it at high temperatures while limiting its access to oxygen, and get biochar, a charcoal-like product that has huge potential to store carbon.

Biomass on its own stores carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but turning it into biochar more effectively locks away that greenhouse gas. Biochar can also be added to soil to nourish crops and has the benefit of being cheaper and much simpler than other carbon removal methods, like direct air capture.

Despite not getting as much attention as other methods of carbon removal, biochar last year accounted for more than 90 percent of the carbon dioxide that was removed from the atmosphere globally, according to CDR.fyi, a company that tracks the carbon removal market.

The obstacles: Research into how long biochar stores carbon has been limited.

One study, published last month in Biomass and Bioenergy, found that biochar buried in a vineyard in Italy remained in the soil for 15 years and was still storing carbon dioxide at the end of that period.

The paper helps to demonstrate biochar’s longer-term carbon storage potential, said Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, who was not involved in the research. Burns said that biochar is a “lot less speculative” than some other carbon removal methods.

But, as the study’s authors acknowledged, biochar’s carbon storage potential hasn’t been widely studied outside of the lab.

“It’s good news, but they’re going to need more research,” Burns said.

There are also concerns that the production of biochar can produce carbon dioxide emissions of its own. And there’s the question of how to encourage farmers to utilize biochar, Burns said. Biochar can be expensive to transport and there can be regulatory hurdles to using it, he added.

What’s next: Some advocates for biochar hope that, as the industry expands, it will draw attention from high-quality carbon-credit registries with rigorous standards.

“What I’d hope to see is just consistent industrywide rigor in how the amount of carbon removed is measured and the full life-cycle analysis,” said Peter Reinhardt, chief executive of Charm Industrial, a start-up that converts biomass into biochar. — Allison Prang

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Originally published via the New York Times