Recent Advisory Opinions on Climate Change: Implications for the Global South

Abstract

Climate change is a grave threat that occupies the minds of academics, lawmakers, and the general populace alike. In recent times, international courts and tribunals have rendered several landmark advisory opinions on climate change. These include the advisory opinions rendered by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (“ITLOS”), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (“IACtHR”), and the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”). In addition, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“AfCHPR”) has received a request for an advisory opinion on climate change regarding the obligations of African States. While these three opinions agree on the existential importance of climate change and the overarching obligations to prevent the harms consequent upon it, each forum has adopted a different legal framework to analyse the issue. ITLOS has emphasised the defining of anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas (“GHG”) emissions as tantamount to “marine pollution” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”). The IACtHR has taken a human rights approach, recognising a distinct “human right to a healthy climate” over and above the traditional right to a healthy environment. On the other hand, the ICJ has utilised customary international law as the foundational basis for declaring a “stringent due diligence” standard that all states must uphold as a legal obligation. In this necessary context, it becomes incumbent to analyse the three decisions in comparison with one another, not merely to identify their commonalities and differences, but also to understand how their dicta affect the rights and obligations of the Global South. While mainstream international legal scholarship has largely celebrated these opinions as a historic step forward for climate justice, a closer look at their structural underpinnings reveals a more unsettling reality. The legal landscape is inseparable from the broader world economy, which is currently reeling from compounding social and ecological shocks, human development pressures, and the shattering of core planetary boundaries. In this blog, we analyse how, despite their progressive rhetoric, these three advisory opinions suffer from structural blind spots that inadvertently protect the status quo of international legal paradigms. Specifically, we want to explore how these tribunals have failed to address the temporal nature of the climate crisis, the persistent inadequacy in concretising historical reparations, and the inability to centre climate vulnerabilities at the doorstep of extractive capitalist interests. Finally, we will examine whether the foundational principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (“CBDR-RC”) has been weakened or diluted in practice. By reading these judicial interventions through a Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”) lens, we hope to evaluate the actual progress they have produced alongside the critical shortfalls they reveal.

Keywords: TWAIL; Climate justice; International Law; Advisory Opinions; Climate Change.

DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/154-05

Publication date: July 28^th 2026