https://archive.md/FChhE
"The group of students who logged in to Justin Rose’s class on international
environmental law in February 2019 were spread out across thousands of miles of
ocean. Many were based at the Port Vila campus on Éfaté, a small but
mountainous island of vivid tropical green in the middle of Vanuatu’s
archipelago of volcanoes, where the University of the South Pacific’s school of
law is based. But U.S.P. also had campuses in Fiji, Samoa, Tuvalu, the Cook
Islands, Kiribati and other island nations — places that were experiencing some
of the most pronounced impacts of the planet’s fast-changing climate.
It was always a tough class to teach, Rose, an Australian expert in Pacific
Island law, told me in July. There are few classes in which the profound
impacts of climate change feel less theoretical or the power of the students
more constrained. As the class began, rising seas meant that villages across
the South Pacific were already being compelled to move to higher ground,
forcing people to abandon their homes and the livelihoods that once sustained
them. Often, the graveyards left behind slid into the sea, scattering bones
into the surf. Some countries were so low-lying that they were in danger of
erasure. “It’s a pretty grim thing to have to do, year after year — to tell
young Pacific Islanders that the best available science says they won’t have
habitable sovereign territory within their lifetimes,” Rose says.
Coral reefs were bleaching and dying in the warming water, taking with them the
complex communities of fish and other creatures that depend on them for food
and shelter — and impoverishing the many people who rely on the ocean for food.
Precious fresh water was becoming unusable for farming or drinking as it mixed
with rising sea water. Devastating tropical cyclones had become an annual
occurrence, flooding cities and destroying homes and infrastructure. Even the
U.S.P. campus on Éfaté was badly hit four years earlier, by a Category 5
cyclone that displaced 45 percent of the residents of Tuvalu before slamming
into Vanuatu and damaging 90 percent of the buildings in the country’s capital.
“Because we were a small class of students from the Pacific Islands, we had
that empathy for each other,” Sulia Makasini, who attended from Tonga,
remembers. “Most times when we were discussing, there’s not much words needed
because we all know exactly what we all are going through.” She grew up near
the Fanga’uta Lagoon, which was once a key source of food but is now polluted
and overfished, and watched as sea levels rose, erasing once-familiar beaches.
Just a year earlier, a Category 4 tropical cyclone devastated the country,
flattening the Parliament building where she worked and cutting off power,
internet and water for weeks afterward. In Tonga, she said, anyone could see
that “climate change is the most prevalent threat and issue facing us right
now.” Makasini applied to law school because she wanted to know what her
government’s responsibilities were to her, as a citizen. She also wanted to
know what international law had to say about the responsibilities of other
countries, especially those doing the most to cause the warming of the planet —
unlike Tonga, whose 100,000 people contribute an estimated one-hundredth of 1
percent of global emissions.
The harm was exceedingly clear. What was less clear was what could be done
about it."
Originally at
<
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/magazine/global-climate-law-students.html>
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
