The opinion won’t be legally binding, but it could help shape future efforts to hold major emitters accountable and secure the funding and action small island nations need to adapt or survive.
It comes after decades of frustration for Pacific nations who’ve watched their homelands disappear. In Tuvalu, where the average elevation is just 2 meters (6.6 feet), more than a third of the population has applied for a climate migration visa to Australia. By 2100, much of the country is projected to be under water at high tide. In Nauru, the government has begun selling passports to wealthy foreigners — offering visa-free access to dozens of countries — in a bid to generate revenue for possible relocation efforts.
“The agreements being made at an international level between states are not moving fast enough,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister for climate change. “They’re definitely not being met according to what the science tells us needs to happen.”
Vanuatu has already sought opinions from other international courts and is pushing for the recognition of ecocide — the destruction of the environment — as a crime under the International Criminal Court. “We have to keep fighting till the last bit,” Regenvanu said.
How climate change is devastating Vanuatu
For children in Vanuatu, climate change isn’t a theory — it’s a classroom, or the lack of one.
At Sainte Jeanne D’Arc school on Efate Island, elementary school teacher Noellina Tavi has spent two of the last three years teaching her students in tents — first after the 2023 cyclones and again following the 2024 earthquake.
Noellina Tavi teaches elementary school students in a tented classroom at Sainte Jeanne D’Arc school in Port Vila on July 17. Annika Hammerschlag / AP
With a shortage of emergency tents, her class was combined with another. Students fidget and lose focus. “It’s too crowded,” Tavi said. “We can’t work peacefully.”
When it rains, the tents turn cold and muddy. Tavi often sends students home so they don’t get sick. Anytime a storm approaches, the tents must be dismantled, the furniture carried to shelter and the children sent home. “That disrupts their education for a whole week,” she said.
In rural areas, extreme weather hits something even more basic: food security. On Nguna Island, farmer Kaltang Laban has watched cyclones wipe out the banana, cassava and taro crops that feed his community.
“After a cyclone, we would have nothing for months,” he said. Now, with support from Save the Children, Laban and other farmers are storing preserved fruits and vegetables in a facility beside their gardens. “But not every community has this,” he said.
More than 70% of Vanuatu’s population lives in rural areas and depends on small-scale farming.
Children play on Pele Island, Vanuatu, on Thursday.Annika Hammerschlag / AP
In 2025, USAID cut funding for a rainwater harvesting initiative designed to improve water access at cyclone evacuation centers in one of the country’s most remote, drought-prone provinces, said Vomboe Shem, climate lead for Save the Children Vanuatu. The materials had already been shipped and distributed, but the project was halted.
“These disasters are happening over and over again,” Shem said. “It’s pushing our communities to their limits.”
Not all of these impacts can be pinned solely on climate change, said Christina Shaw, CEO of the Vanuatu Environmental Science Society. Coastal development, tectonic sinking, volcanic eruptions, deforestation and pollution are also contributing to ecosystem decline.
“Vanuatu’s environment is quite fragile by its inherent nature in that it’s young with narrow reefs, has small amounts of topsoil and is insulted regularly by natural disasters,” she said. “But we do have to think about the other human impacts on our environment as well.”
The damage isn’t limited to homes, gardens and reefs — it’s reaching into places once thought to be untouchable.
On the island of Pele, village chief Amos Kalsont sits at his brother’s grave as waves lap against broken headstones half-buried in sand. At high tide, both his brother’s and father’s graves sit just a few arm’s lengths from the sea. Some homes and gardens have already been moved inland, and saltwater intrusion has tainted the community’s primary drinking water source. Now, the community is considering relocating the entire village — but that would mean leaving the land their grandparents cleared by hand.