Opinion by Payam Akhavan
“If you respect nature, nature will respect you.”
This is the ancient wisdom of the Indigenous people of Tuvalu, a small island state in the South Pacific Ocean with some 10,000 inhabitants.
Those words have particular resonance today because their ancestral home is likely to be submerged within the foreseeable future by alarming sea-level rise and extreme weather events – the catastrophic consequences of global warming.
The main island of Funafuti is just one square mile. It is easy to ignore the existential threats faced by this minuscule nation halfway around the world, but as the air in Toronto and New York becomes too toxic to breathe because of massive forest fires in northern Ontario, or as numerous people die because of unprecedented heatwaves in Paris and London, it becomes clear that climate change will not spare anyone.
At the UN Conference on Climate Change held in Glasgow in 2021, Tuvalu, among the smallest UN members, joined Antigua and Barbuda, Vanuatu, the Bahamas and others, to establish the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, to litigate global warming before international courts and tribunals.
I had the privilege of representing the Commission in these historic proceedings between 2022 and 2025. The turn to binding international law was motivated by frustration that the states most responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have failed to make sufficient progress toward their net-zero emission targets. Consistent with the best available scientific evidence, the 2015 Paris Agreement recognised that temperature rise must be kept to within 1.5 C above pre-industrial averages to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. But based on current policies, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change has projected an alarming temperature rise of 3.2 C by the end of the century.
This is a death sentence for climate-vulnerable states in the Global South that do not have adequate means for adaptation. It would also result in a dystopian future for the Global North, which would suffer catastrophic impacts far worse than those we are witnessing today.
In its unanimous advisory opinion delivered in 2025, the International Court of Justice at The Hague held that states have legally binding obligations to protect the climate system, limit global warming to 1.5 C, and prevent significant environmental harm. To fail to do so “may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that State.”
What is more, the Court also recognised that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a fundamental precondition for the enjoyment of human rights such as the right to life, health and an adequate standard of living. This seminal jurisprudence from the principal judicial organ of the UN supplements that of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea on protection of the marine environment, and that of regional courts, including the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and a pending case before the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights. It is notable that to the extent these opinions reflect customary international law, they are directly applicable before Canadian courts under the common law doctrine of “adoption.” Indigenous groups have already relied on these precedents, including in the recent case of Lho’Imggin v. Canada before the Federal Courts.
To the extent that we still believe in a rules-based international order, this authoritative statement of binding international law requires a far-reaching transformation of our policy goals and priorities, and audacious initiatives in global governance, however politically inconvenient that may be. It is easy for the sophisticated cynic to dismiss this idea as unrealistic, not least at a time when multilateralism and global respect for human rights have significantly declined. But as the Indigenous Tuvaluans would remind us from their disappearing home in the South Pacific, what we are up against are the laws of nature, and in a contest with Mother Earth, we will certainly lose.
As I concluded before the Court on behalf of Small Island States: “The climate system does not recognise the artificial boundaries that we have created in our political imagination. There is one Earth, one humankind, and one supreme law that none can escape, which is to live in harmony with nature, or to perish.”
The notion of an interdependent planetary civilisation and what it demands of us is not naive idealism; it is an inescapable reality that we must embrace sooner rather than later for our common survival.
Payam Akhavan is a barrister at Twenty Essex Chambers in London and Human Rights Chair at Massey College, University of Toronto.
