While the court doesn’t have enforcement mechanisms, it has a prominent voice, and its legal arguments could reverberate.

On July 23rd, after two years and an unprecedented number of submissions from governments and international institutions, the court delivered a unanimous verdict. In its opinion, climate change constitutes an “urgent and existential threat” that states must protect people from.

The United Nations’ top court has issued a landmark advisory opinion on climate change, its 15-black-robed judges weighing in for the first time on what the court’s president called “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet.