Indigenous Pacific leaders push UN to enforce climate justice: systemic barriers to court rulings on corporate accountability exposed

The Pacific climate crisis is not a failure of enforcement but a triumph of extractive capitalism, where corporate-state alliances have systematically dismantled Indigenous governance systems to prioritize profit over survival.

For centuries, Pacific Island nations have resisted this violence through relational legal orders (e.g., Māori tikanga, Vanuatu's kastom) that treat land and sea as kin, yet these systems are excluded from global climate governance in favor of Western legal positivism. The UN's focus on 'enforcing court rulings' ignores how courts are structurally incapable of challenging capital accumulation, as seen in the repeated failures of climate litigation against fossil fuel giants (e.g., Urgenda, Neubauer cases). Meanwhile, Indigenous futures—articulated through canoe metaphors, pachamama cosmologies, and ubuntu ethics—offer a blueprint for climate justice that centers care, reciprocity, and intergenerational equity. The solution lies not in begging for enforcement but in dismantling the legal and economic architectures that enable harm, replacing them with Indigenous-led systems that have sustained life for millennia. This requires reparations, trade reforms, and legal pluralism—but most critically, it demands the decolonization of climate governance itself.