On May 2, 2025, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) received a formal petition requesting an advisory opinion on the human rights obligations of African States in relation to the climate change crisis. The petition before the AfCHPR details a continent already experiencing widespread and severe impacts at approximately 1.3°C of global warming. A recent World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report highlights that Africa experienced near-record temperatures in 2024, alongside widespread drought, rising heat-related deaths, water insecurity, and severe livelihood disruptions.
These realities underscore a central concern raised by African States during the International Court of Justice (ICJ) proceedings that the widely endorsed 1.5°C threshold represents a political compromise rather than a limit capable of safeguarding the most vulnerable groups’ rights. However, the ICJ’s advisory opinion made little reference to Africa’s particular vulnerabilities and avoided key issues, such as differentiated responsibilities and the protection of vulnerable groups. These concerns make the outcome of the AfCHPR advisory opinion especially crucial.
In this blog, I argue that the AfCHPR has an opportunity to issue a transformative advisory opinion that positions African States as the global conscience and vanguard of climate justice beyond the 1.5°C paradigm. I consider how the Court might do so by responding to gaps in existing climate advisory opinions and articulating a more regionally grounded understanding of States’ obligations.
Why the 1.5°C Threshold is Inadequate for Africa?
On 23 July 2025, the ICJ issued its long-awaited advisory opinion on states’ obligations in respect of climate change. The ICJ recognized climate change as an “urgent and existential threat of planetary proportions.” However, by elevating the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal without addressing regional disparities in vulnerability or responsibility, and with no reference to the fair allocation of the global carbon budget, the opinion offered limited guidance for the world’s most climate-exposed regions.
Despite extensive participation by African States in the ICJ proceeding, the opinion made no meaningful reference to Africa’s particular exposure to climate risk, nor did it engage substantively with the situation of vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by climate impacts. While the differentiation of obligations was affirmed, the Court avoided substantive engagement with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, declining to address how historical emissions and unequal capacities should shape the scope of States’ obligations. The ICJ’s opinion also refrained from recognising specific obligations aimed at preventing or mitigating the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations. The result is a legal framework that treats climate vulnerability as abstract and uniform, rather than regionally and historically differentiated. For Africa, this approach is incompatible with present climate realities.
2025 was the third hottest year on record. At current rates, the world could exceed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit before 2030, more than a decade earlier than expected. The current warming is between 1.34°C and 1.41°C and has already produced climate impacts of exceptional scale on African Continent. As a WMO report indicates, prolonged droughts now affect tens of millions in Southern Africa, lethal heatwaves have resulted in dozens of deaths within days, and extreme flooding has displaced more than a million people in Central Africa. According to the United Nations, nearly the entire ocean area surrounding Africa experienced marine heatwaves of strong to extreme intensity last year, with particularly severe impacts in the tropical Atlantic.
These incidents show that the harms associated with 1.5°C are neither theoretical nor distant. For many African communities, they are already occurring at today’s lower temperature levels. Given the ICJ’s failure to engage with Africa’s specific vulnerability and with the inadequacy of 1.5°C in that context, it is precisely these omissions that prompted the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU), supported by several civil society organisations including the African Climate Platform, Natural Justice, Resilient40, and the Environmental Lawyers Collective for Africa, to seek a more ambitious articulation of climate obligations before the African Court.
The petition (para 2) submitted to the AfPHRC emphasises that Africa’s climate vulnerability is rooted in historical inequities, including colonial exploitation that dismantled Indigenous land-management systems and left enduring legacies of underdevelopment and ecological degradation. It (para 149) asks the Court to consider obligations “to cooperate with historical emitters to limit global warming to below the 1.5°C threshold,” but underlines that “the 1.5°C threshold is considered to be, at best, a political compromise, not a true ‘safe limit’” given that temperatures reached +1.75°C in January 2025. The global reliance on a single temperature benchmark also obscures disparities in vulnerability and exposure, reinforcing structural inequities by treating all regions as if they faced comparable risks.
For these reasons, the AfPHRC bears both the responsibility and the opportunity to consider standards that extend beyond existing global baselines. The right to a satisfactory environment under the African Charter (Article 24), interpreted in light of the continent’s demonstrated vulnerability, calls for a more ambitious articulation of state obligations that addresses structural inequities, reflects differentiated responsibilities, and recognises that the harms associated with 1.5°C have already been experienced across Africa. But on what legal, institutional, and moral grounds can the African Court articulate such obligations?
The AfCHPR’s Authority to Articulate More Ambitious Climate Obligations
The petition asks the AfCHPR to consider whether African States have an obligation to demand that the global temperature rise to be kept below 1.5°C as part of their duty to protect present and future generations from serious and irreversible harm (paras. 144 and 149). It invites the AfPHRC to address not only States’ obligations under the African Charter, but also their responsibilities to advocate internationally for more ambitious emissions reductions by historical emitters, adequate climate finance, and equitable frameworks for adaptation and just transition (para. 146). This call is grounded in the enduring legacy of historical and colonial inequities that have shaped Africa’s vulnerability.
Africa has the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions globally yet faces severe climate impacts and limited access to climate finance. A 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report affirmed that colonialism not only contributed to the climate crisis itself but also left enduring harms that have made many communities in former colonies more vulnerable to climate impacts. For example, a 2025 Amnesty International report found that droughts in Madagascar are being intensified by human-induced climate change driven largely by high-income, historically high-emitting countries, whose colonial rule left the Antandroy people particularly vulnerable. Considering historical injustice and disproportionate harm, the AfPHRC occupies a position of legal authority and moral leadership to call for climate ambition beyond the 1.5°C threshold, including more robust obligations on international corporations and institutions whose activities continue to shape Africa’s climate vulnerability.
The African Charter establishes a unique source of authority and responsibility for the AfCHPR to interpret and protect collective rights in the context of climate change, including the right of all peoples to a satisfactory environment favourable to their development under Article 24. Unlike many international and regional legal instruments, the Charter explicitly recognises collective rights and thus provides the Court with a distinctive normative basis for addressing climate-related harm. The petition invites the Court to read Article 24 in a way that directly addresses climate change. If the Court does so, for the first time, this right may be expressly articulated in the climate change and human rights context as a basis for understanding how environmental harm undermines the effective enjoyment of a wide range of other rights. The collective character of this right is particularly important in the climate context, where harms often threaten entire communities, cultures, and relationships to land and natural resources. It is therefore directly relevant to the rights of Indigenous peoples, minorities, and other groups whose cultural survival may be undermined by climate impacts, and it strengthens the legal framing of self-determination where climate change implicates territorial integrity, statehood, and shifting boundaries.
Article 24 of the African Charter positions environmental protection not merely as an instrument for safeguarding other rights, but as a standalone and justiciable guarantee that can be understood as having intrinsic value. This offers the AfPHRC a firmer normative foundation than advisory opinions that treat environmental protection primarily as derivative of other obligations, enabling a more direct articulation of climate duties. In practice, this collective environmental right also provides a critical basis for addressing climate-related displacement, which frequently affects communities as a whole and disrupts cultural continuity. It supports both the protective application of non-refoulement in relation to climate-displaced persons and the recognition of positive obligations to prevent displacement where possible, mitigate foreseeable harms, and ensure that any relocation protects the rights to remain, relocate with dignity, and return where feasible.
An African Vision of Climate Justice: Opportunity to Establish Ambitious Climate Standards Beyond Global Baselines
Drawing on African philosophies of communal responsibility and the African Charter’s emphasis on collective rights, the AfCHPR can articulate a transformative vision of climate protection. Such guidance could include the removal of legal and procedural barriers to climate litigation, the establishment of specialised climate courts with simplified procedures, strengthened rights to public participation in environmental decision-making, and enhanced protections for environmental defenders. It could also encourage deeper Pan-African cooperation through shared adaptation strategies, joint litigation initiatives, and coordinated negotiating positions in international climate forums.
Article 21(5) of the African Charter provides a legal basis for addressing corporate climate harm by requiring States Parties to eliminate foreign economic exploitation. This provision is expressly invoked in the petition (para. 93), which asks the AfPHRC to clarify the obligations of African States in relation to climate-related harms caused by third parties, including multinational corporations operating within their jurisdictions.
Building on this framework, the AfPHRC could move beyond voluntary corporate standards and affirm binding obligations requiring mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence across corporate value chains, parent company liability for climate harm caused by subsidiaries, and effective access to remedies through the removal of legal and jurisdictional barriers. It could further reinforce requirements for comprehensive environmental impact assessments prior to major projects, public disclosure of corporate emissions through accessible registries, and accountability for false reporting. Such standards would also support extraterritorial obligations to prevent transboundary climate harm and ensure that foreign companies operating in Africa are held to levels of accountability no lower than those applicable in their home states. Addressing these obligations can support a just, transparent, and accountable transition in the African context.
The African Advisory Opinion presents a rare opportunity to affirm that climate obligations cannot be limited to a global temperature target that has already exceeded and proven insufficient for Africa. Grounded in the African Charter and shaped by the continent’s lived experience of climate harm, the AfPHRC can articulate rights-based standards that demand ambition beyond 1.5°C where necessary to prevent serious and irreversible harm. In doing so, the AfPHRC has the potential to set a transformative benchmark for climate justice that resonates far beyond the continent.