Our local to global biophysical systems (climate change, biodiversity loss) face crises and basic needs to fulfil human rights remain unmet. Yet our economic, political and legal systems keep externalizing socio-environmental issues. Hence, we ask: How can the continuous externalization of socio-environmental impacts at global to local level be addressed by building on existing legal concepts? Building on literature, the concept of Earth System Justice and legal precedents, we conclude that: (a) safe planetary boundaries are needed to protect the planetary commons in the public interest with states holding them in public trust. (b) Just boundaries require the application of the no significant harm principle of customary international law to planetary systems. This demands stringent due diligence that unlocks structural lock-ins rather than merely undertaking administrative activities. (c) Just boundaries reduce the available ecospace, a portion of which must be reserved to meet basic needs to fulfil human rights. The remaining ecospace must be shared equitably in line with Earth System Justice. (d) These findings contest the values of the dominant economic and governance system because they require more hierarchical global principes, pointing toward legal reforms in the direction of a global constitution.
The world we live in is at an inflection point. The global challenges are too complex to be addressed by any single country The United Nations (UN) was created precisely for such situations. The UN is now under tremendous pressure from various quarters including geopolitical, financial and the member-driven erosion of international law on which the UN Charter rests. Over the last 81 years, the UN has been a prime actor, witness and protector of the enormous civilizational progress that took place for the humankind and the planet earth. However, this progress in conjunction with the rising needs of the 8 billion global population “consuming at the rate of 1.7 planets a year”, have placed the Earth in peril. In this grim scenario, the role of the UN is indispensable. Often it is the UN Secretary-General, as a whistleblower and a messenger, who shakes the conscience of the member states in warnings such as “speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe” or “673 million people still go to bed hungry every night”. Thus, at this critical juncture, the UN needs all the wherewithal to provide planetary safeguards for the complex challenges of our time including technologies such as Artificial Intelligence rapidly spreading across the world. This calls for looking at the genesis of the planet in peril especially in the post-decolonization period [1960-2026]. As a corollary, the scholarly task is cut out to examine the role of the UN processes and dialogues even as the UN.02 Action Plan are underway amid unprecedented financial squeeze. The need for futuristic cutting-edge ideas to rescue the planet was never so dire as it is today. The EPL remains a sentinel, within the scholarly realm, to provide a knowledge platform for ideas on securing our planetary future in the UN-led world order.
The ICJ's 2025 Advisory Opinion (AO) on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change provides extensive guidance on the climate-related implications of several international legal frameworks. However, it also suggests how certain frameworks might apply to other sectoral fields of international environmental governance, including transboundary water resources management. Though the AO is non-binding, scholars and practitioners working in this field can now more confidently assess the full implications of a range of rule complexes, including international environmental law and human rights law, for States’ international water-related obligations. In assessing the climate-related obligations of States, the Court demonstrates how different specialist fields of international law interact with and influence each other through the phenomenon of legal “convergence”. While such interaction counteracts the risk of “fragmentation” and promotes a measure of unity and coherence across the international law system, it also comprises processes and mechanisms by means of which progressive environmental and social sustainability values can be transmitted throughout the system and incorporated into specific legal sub-fields. Thus, the ICJ AO facilitates international water law's progressive evolution, thereby helping to ensure that it remains equipped to address the looming challenges for equitable and sustainable transboundary water resources management.
This article examines how the 2025 Advisory Opinion (AO) of the International Court of Justice on Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change places human rights at the centre of States’ climate specific obligations, with particular emphasis on the right to a healthy environment. It argues that, although the Court adopts a restrained and methodologically cautious approach, it nonetheless grounds climate obligations in core human rights treaties and customary human rights law. The article shows that the AO, when read alongside separate judicial views and recent institutional developments, significantly advances the normative consolidation of the right to a healthy environment and strengthens its trajectory toward customary status. At the same time, the AO leaves important gaps, particularly regarding intergenerational equity, the situation of especially affected States, and individuals’ access to remedies, highlighting both the limits of the Court's intervention and the continuing need for a more comprehensive human-rights-based approach to climate obligations.
The three climate treaties [UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement] treat the ocean as a carbon sink, a service provider to the climate system whose absorptive capacity is to be conserved and enhanced. The advisory opinions delivered by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea [ITLOS] in 2024 and the International Court of Justice [ICJ] in 2025 replace that instrumental frame with a legal one. Reading the two opinions together, and alongside the Inter-American Court of Human Rights' [IACtHR] opinion of 2025, this article traces three converging threads. First, the ocean is recognised as more than a sink: an inherently valuable part of the environment whose protection and preservation are ends in themselves under the law of the sea. Second, the centre of gravity of climate law shifts from managing permitted harm to prohibiting significant harm, policed by a stringent, science-referenced standard of due diligence and enforced through the ordinary law of State responsibility. Third, the climate regime, mired for years in overly permissive readings, is re-embedded in general international law, its cooperative machinery re-read as obligation rather than aspiration. The article examines what this turn means for ocean governance, for the negotiations and for the litigation now unfolding.
