Timing the Environment in International Law: Reflections on Temporality in the Three Advisory Opinions on Climate Change

In this blog post, I argue that one of the primary ways in which international law articulates the problem of climate change is through time: more specifically, through the creation of temporal boundaries that delimit climate change’s start, translating the impossibly vast temporality of the climate hyperobject into the smaller scale of legal responsibility. By following how the ICJ, ITLOS, and Inter-American Court of Human Rights have positioned law and climate change ‘in’ time, I aim to show not only the different bordering functions of time, as a kind of jurisdictional scope for international law’s grasp on the climate, but also use this as the starting point for a map of something like the climate ‘imaginary’ of international law—what it is that different regimes and courts visualise, integrate, and exclude from their minds when they try to think about our changing climate.