7. Conclusion

It can be argued that public international law, as traditionally configured, has enabled the climate crisis. This is because it has facilitated the extractivism at the heart of the global industrial-capitalist system that has driven global environmental decline. As has been seen in this chapter, there have been some steps away from this paradigm in international law, but to date these have not matched the scale of the challenge faced by humanity in the Anthropocene, the era in which human activities have become the dominant force of planetary environmental change.

The ICJ’s landmark advisory opinion in Obligations of States in Relation to Climate Change indicates that alternative visions are available, that reimaginings of public international law that take seriously the reality of global environmental crises are possible. However, for these to be realised in practice there is an urgent need for creative and intentional climate-conscious lawyering, to bring to the mechanisms of international lawmaking (treaty-making, state practice and court proceedings) an Earth-centred agenda that can safeguard, to use the words of the ICJ in its Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion, the ‘living space, the quality of life and the very health of human beings, including generations unborn’.^[1]