Indigenous people living in isolated islands in northern Australia filed a lawsuit on Tuesday (October 26th) in an attempt to force the government to protect their land by further reducing its carbon emissions.
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In their collective legal action, these residents of the islands of Boigu and Saibai in the Torres Strait argue that rising sea levels due to global warming pose an existential threat to their land and to their culture. They are asking an Australian Federal Court to order Canberra "
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will prevent Torres Strait Islanders from becoming climate refugees
."
This is the first time that such a global warming lawsuit has been launched by indigenous Australians.
About 5,000 people inhabit Australia's 274 islands in the Torres Strait, which separates Australia from Papua New Guinea.
Several of these lowly elevated islands will become uninhabitable if the global average temperature rises more than 1.5 ° C compared to the pre-industrial era, the lawsuit argues.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that this increase could occur by 2030.
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The appeal comes the same day the Australian government announced it was aiming for carbon neutrality in 2050, but without providing details on how it intends to achieve it and renewing its strong support for the mining and gas industries.
Paul Kaibai, a resident of Saibai, explained that repeated flooding and salt-soaked soils are starting to make life on his island impossible.
“
Becoming a climate refugee means losing everything: our homes, our culture, our stories, our identity,
” he lamented.
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