[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

The unravelling of the world around us is a familiar reality for young people in the Pacific. We see flooded homes, coastlines retreating and sacred cultural sites disappearing. Left in their place is uncertainty, grief and anxiety concerning what tomorrow will look like. Young people are inheriting a crisis they did not create – a crisis that is on track to cause immense harm, loss and damage that puts the survival of communities in question. Yet in the midst of this, they are expected to adapt, rebuild, survive within broken systems, carrying an unfair burden of the future. Faced with this reality, young people did not wait to act.

As a direct response to the escalating impacts of climate change and the inability of existing systems to address the climate crisis, a campaign to take climate change to the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), was initiated by a group of 27 law students in the Pacific. For them, the science was clear, the impacts were undeniable, but accountability was missing. This was the gap this initiative sought to fill. The idea was not entirely new to the region as, decades ago, Pacific states had gone to the ICJ to bring the case against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This initiative drew its inspiration from this legacy of rising up to battle another existential threat.

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The crucial question was whether states have legal obligations to protect people and the planet from climate harm, and what legal consequences flow from a failure to meet those obligations. From its beginning, the campaign was set up to be a strategic intervention in the global fight against climate change by using international law to clarify state obligations and to shift climate action from the realm of political convenience to legal responsibility.

What followed was a six-year journey that culminated in the delivery of a historic, unanimous Advisory Opinion on 23 July 2025: that climate change is an existential threat and that states must act. The Court said decisively that states have obligations under multiple sources of international law and that breaches of these obligations carry legal consequences.

Widely hailed as a win for climate justice, the Advisory Opinion provided a strong foundation on which to build accountability and strengthened the voices of frontline communities all over the world. Youth leadership was not incidental to this outcome but a distinct and necessary force in this journey that helped realise this landmark ruling.

Much of the youth and civil society campaign was about breaking free from the status quo and imagining new ideas. It was built on a willingness to re-envision a new legal, political and moral framework that is grounded in the core elements of climate justice, intergenerational equity, human rights and collective responsibility.

This shared vision was also about changing the way in which systems see and utilise the law, re-imaging it as a transformative tool rather than a static observer of harm. In doing so, the campaign challenged the siloed thinking that has long plagued climate governance by bringing together elements such as climate science and law, human rights, environment law, our oceans and other elements of the physical environment, development, self-determination, culture and sustainability. These domains are deeply interconnected in lived reality, particularly in the Pacific, yet they are too often treated separately in global decision-making. The Advisory Opinion provides an opportunity to move beyond piecemeal approaches and confront the climate crisis holistically.

At its heart, however, this campaign was about voice. It was about carrying the voice of our region, the most affected people, and the voices of young people of today and those of tomorrow into one of the most powerful institutions of law. It was about ensuring that global institutions no longer remained divorced from the realities on the ground and ignorant of what is truly at stake.

Guided by this vision, the role of young people in the Advisory Opinion campaign focused first on building a global, intergenerational movement that could help mobilise support for the various phases of the work in the campaign. Young people from the Pacific helped bring together a network of young people from around the world under the World’s Youth for Climate Justice to help turn this into a global youth campaign. Gradually the coalitions began to grow with civil society (Alliance for a Climate Justice Advisory Opinion), legal scholars and academics, and several community groups. A key part of this movement was the very close collaboration between young people and with Pacific governments. The Vanuatu government has been one of the entities that has been particularly supportive of the campaign since its inception. This solidarity ensured a shared understanding, strengthened political momentum and amplified the collective impact needed to galvanise the global support needed by the campaign.

In addition to working alongside our governments, young people played a strong role in youth-led diplomacy that helped secure the unanimous UN Resolution 77/276 (March 2023) directing the ICJ to issue an Advisory Opinion. This youth-led diplomacy began in the Pacific, secured the endorsement of the Pacific Islands States and gradually moved to other regions as the momentum began to build. Even during the Court’s proceedings, youth-led outreach to governments helped ensure that countries made robust arguments in their submissions that also included community and youth voices. Across the Pacific, many young people worked with their communities in collecting evidence, supporting the drafting of statement, and ensuring that these proceedings became the most inclusive proceedings before the ICJ.

Inclusivity also required demystifying international law itself. The campaign prioritised translating legal language into accessible narratives, integrating storytelling, visuals, songs and creative media that were friendly to a wide range of audiences. Indeed, the strength of the movement and the ability to mobilise depended heavily on a strong communications strategy that leveraged both traditional media and social media, but also other creative digital platforms, such as Not Just Celsius,Footnote1 and initiatives like Witness Stand for Climate Justice.Footnote2 It also meant creating spaces such as the People’s Assembly that gave a platform to representatives from climate-affected communities to deliver their testimonies to be consolidated into the People’s PetitionFootnote3 – a 104-page document that was presented to the ICJ. This work was carried out in close partnership with committed allies who shared the belief that legal processes must be understood and owned by the people they are meant to serve.

Young people also did not stay outside the courtroom. With the support of the Pacific governments, regional and sub-regional organisations, youth were allowed the opportunity to speak directly before the Court and deliver oral statements. We, the present authors, had the opportunity to work closely with the Melanesian Spearhead Group and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community during the ICJ Oral proceedings in which our Director, Vishal Prasad, and Former PISFCC President Cynthia Houniuhi also participated as Pacific Youths, presenting their submissions to the ICJ. These statements brought to the judges the moral authority of young people and of the Pacific; this was a very clear call for justice that is built not just on the legal arguments but also on the realities of people on the ground. Our Director was also the leading participant in webinars hosted by the Commonwealth Foundation concerning the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion (ICJAO) campaign.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion on climate change did not emerge from established power centres. It was shaped by young people who refused to accept that inaction was inevitable, that harm could continue without consequence or that their futures were negotiable. The campaign demonstrated that youth are not simply demanding space within existing systems – they are reimagining how power is exercised, how responsibility is defined, and how justice is pursued.

As the focus now turns to implementation, young people remain at the forefront: translating legal clarity into political obligation, grounding international law in lived experience, and ensuring that this opinion becomes a tool for real change rather than another document on a shelf.

Vishal Prasad & Belyndar Rikimani are with the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change.