by Maria Syed, 3 February 2025

Background:

The campaign originated from Pacific Island youth, who have advocated for referring a climate justice case to the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), seeking an Advisory Opinion on the nexus between climate change and human rights. The case established the importance of scientific evidence in demonstrating that climate change is anthropogenic, wreaking havoc on planetary boundaries, and grounded in human rights principles as well as international climate change law.

This includes the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which must be implemented within national frameworks.This climate litigation’s advisory opinion seeks to:

Clarify the obligations of states to “ensure the protection of the climate system” and the environment from greenhouse gas emissions for “present and future generations.”
Determine the legal consequences under these obligations for states whose acts or omissions have caused significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment.

The focus is on “states that are injured or specifically affected by, or are particularly vulnerable to, the adverse effects of climate change,” while considering the present and future generations impacted by these adverse effects.

Major Research Objectives:

Our research focused on addressing the following questions:

What do we mean by an intersectional and interdisciplinary climate justice, that aims for systemic change?
How can media, science and data be used for a storytelling approach to climate justice?
Whose voices and knowledge does climate justice need to favor and which had been omitted since its emergence over the past decades?
How are those who have caused the harm, dealing with their responsibility to reduce current and future emissions?
How are climate policies increasing or reducing existing social, economic, and political inequalities?

Theoretical Framework:

Our research aimed to deconstruct complex social relationships to explain how climate change, driven by man-made activities, has oppressed and marginalized different groups at different times. Climate change transcends environmental issues, revealing a social crisis that perpetuates economic and political inequalities. The campaign research draws on the scholarship of intersectionality theory, a concept originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to highlight the intersectional experiences of oppression and exclusion faced by Black women (Crenshaw, 1989). This lens acknowledges the nuances of understanding and addressing unique forms of inequality caused by the multifaceted interplay of privileges and oppressions, encompassing environmental issues and climate change.

Climate change has demonstrated disproportionately severe impacts on women, children, Indigenous peoples, and the elderly. Therefore, intersectionality helps frame climate vulnerability as a process mediated by local and global forces, including patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. This perspective shifts the notion of vulnerability from being a “static condition” to one that questions the systemic (institutional) structures governing social life (Mikulewicz et al., 2023).

Both intersectionality and climate justice scholarship used in the research are grounded in decolonial approaches, focusing on the interests of marginalized populations. In other words, the frameworks of intersectionality and climate justice are rooted in a resolute commitment to marginalized groups and power relations that have caused their marginalization, with a shared goal of human emancipation and ending the oppression of these groups (Dolšak et al., 2022). A decolonial approach is essential for addressing climate justice within the historical context of the climate crisis, which has shaped and continues to influence climate vulnerability and actions. This perspective examines the enduring processes of capitalism, imperialism, and international development. Colonial rationality refers to the exploitation and plundering of resources (critical minerals e.g. lithium) and land in countries of the Global South/Global Majority, often for the benefit of others, wreaking havoc on local Indigenous communities while maintaining entrenched political, economic, and social structures of power asymmetry. In this regard,the CBDR (Common-But-Differentiated Responsibility) principle recognizes each country’s responsibility towards their historical and current Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This includes financial systems and mechanisms that exacerbate the vulnerability of already disadvantaged countries and communities, entrapping them in financial constraints and violating human rights (Hamouchene, 2023).

The visualization (Graph 1) below summarizes the topics explored through the intersectionality and decolonial lens.