Indigenous Australians living on a string of climate-threatened islands have lost a landmark court case to hold the government responsible for lacklustre emissions targets, dealing a blow to Indigenous rights in the country.
Australia’s Federal Court ruled on Tuesday that the government was not obliged to shield the Torres Strait Islands from the effects of climate change.
“The applicants have not succeeded in making their primary case in negligence. The Commonwealth did not and does not owe Torres Strait Islanders the duty of care alleged by the applicants in support of their primary case,” Justice Michael Wigney was quoted by SBS news outlet as saying in his ruling.
Scattered through the warm waters off Australia’s northernmost tip, the sparsely populated Torres Strait Islands are threatened by seas rising much faster than the global average.
Torres Strait elders have spent the past four years fighting through the courts to prove the government failed to protect them through meaningful climate action.
“I thought that the decision would be in our favour, and I’m in shock,” said Torres Strait Islander Paul Kabai, who helped to bring the case.
“What do any of us say to our families now?”
Fellow plaintiff Pabai Pabai said: “My heart is broken for my family and my community.”
In his decision, Justice Wigney criticised the government for setting emissions targets between 2015 and 2021 that failed to consider the “best available science”.
But these targets would have had little effect on global temperature rise, he found.
“Any additional greenhouse gases that might have been released by Australia as a result of low emissions targets would have caused no more than an almost immeasurable increase in global average temperatures,” Wigney said.
Australia’s previous conservative government sought to cut emissions by about 26 percent before 2030.
The incumbent left-leaning government in 2022 adopted new plans to slash emissions by 40 percent before the end of the decade and reach net zero by 2050.
Fewer than 5,000 people live in the Torres Strait, a collection of about 274 mud islands and coral cays wedged between Australia’s mainland and Papua New Guinea.
Lawyers for traditional land owners from Boigu and Saibai – among the worst-affected islands – asked the court to order the government “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will prevent Torres Strait Islanders from becoming climate refugees”.
Sea levels in some parts of the archipelago are rising almost three times faster than the global average, according to official figures.
Rising tides have washed away graves, eaten through huge chunks of exposed coastline, and poisoned once-fertile soils with salt.
The lawsuit argued some islands would soon become uninhabitable if global temperatures rose more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The World Meteorological Organization has warned this threshold could be breached before the end of the decade.
More than one billion people will live in coastal areas at risk of rising sea levels by 2050, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Global sea levels could rise by up to 60cm (24 inches) by the end of the century, even if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically reduced, it said.
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