The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change.
Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet.
“I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila.
Photo: AFP
“We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for the past two decades,” he said at the country’s council of chiefs meeting house.
The chief said that his island was battered by three tropical cyclones in 2023, which damaged “a lot of our root crops and forests, and our traditional medicines.”
Global warming “keeps on changing our environment,” he said. “We no longer have fig trees. There’s coastal erosion continuously. Our tide is also changing.”
In The Hague on Wednesday the UN’s top court said in an advisory opinion that countries could be contravening international law if they fail to take measures to protect the planet from climate change, while nations harmed by its effects could be entitled to reparations.
“Failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system ... may constitute an internationally wrongful act,” court president Yuji Iwasawa said during the hearing.
He called climate issues “an existential problem of planetary proportions.”
The non-binding opinion was backed unanimously by the court’s 15 judges.
Additional reporting by AP
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