Understanding the Ocean as Energy: The ITLOS Advisory Opinion on Climate Change as an Earth Systems provocation

This article contends that the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea marks a subtle but significant ontological shift in the legal construction of the ocean under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). By interpreting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions as ‘pollution of the marine environment’ pursuant to article 1(1)(4), and by recognising not only their chemical composition but their thermodynamic impact (ie, their introduction of energy into the ocean), the Advisory Opinion creates an aperture to fracture the dominant imaginary of the ocean as a static, dematerialised space of points, lines, and bounded zones. While the Advisory Opinion does not abandon the territorial grammar of UNCLOS, it unsettles its spatial epistemology from within. Creatively, we can read an alternative legal ontology that locates the ocean within a dynamic, planetary hydrosphere shaped by atmospheric forcings, biogeochemical fluxes, and energetic entanglements.

Philip Steinberg is UArctic Chair in Political Geography at Durham University, where he directs IBRU: Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research, the Durham Arctic Research Centre for Training and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (DurhamARCTIC), and the Northern Ireland / Northeast England Doctoral Training Partnership (NINE DTP). He has published numerous publications and seven books on governance issues, primarily in spaces that test the limits of sovereign jurisdiction, including, most recently, the Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space, co-edited with Jon Anderson, Andrew Davies, and Kimberley Peters. 

Romain Chuffart is the current Nansen Professor in Arctic Studies at the University of Akureyri in Iceland. He is also the managing director of The Arctic Institute - Center for Circumpolar Security Studies, a nonprofit 501c3 registered in Washington DC. He holds a PhD in law from Durham University and specialises in Arctic and ocean governance, critical approaches to international law/legal theory.