HAMBURG: The UN maritime court will on Monday (Sep 11) hear a landmark case brought by a group of small island states seeking protection of the world's oceans from catastrophic climate change. The nine island states have turned to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to determine
HAMBURG: The UN maritime court will on Monday hear a landmark case brought by a group of small island states seeking protection of the world's oceans from catastrophic climate change.
The UN treaty defines pollution as the introduction by humans of"substances or energy into the marine environment" that leads to harm to marine life. "We come here seeking urgent help, in the strong belief that international law is an essential mechanism for correcting the manifest injustice that our people are suffering as a result of climate change."The push for climate justice won a big boost when the UN General Assembly in March adopted a resolution calling on the International Court of Justice to lay out nations' obligations on protecting Earth's climate and the legal consequences they face if they fail to do so.
"Without rapid and ambitious action, climate change may prevent my children and grandchildren from living on the island of their ancestors, the island that we call home. We cannot remain silent in the face of such injustice," said the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne. This is 50 per cent 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", the report published this month noted.