For the 2020 World Disasters Report, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) compiled and analyzed disaster data since the 1960s, looking globally at the number and type of disasters, the number of people affected and how and where and reviewing how this has changed over time. When looking at the trends in disaster data, the impact of climate crisis is clear.

Climate change litigation is a global phenomenon. According to a database maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, as of February 4, 2019 a total of 1,297 climate cases had been filed in courts or other tribunals worldwide. Of these, 1,009—78 percent—were from the United States, Australia was a distant second, with ninety-eight, followed by the United Kingdom with forty-seven. No other country had as many as twenty. The cases were filed in twenty-nine countries and six international tribunals, led by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which had forty-one.

These Proceedings remarks aim to address interrogations on a Global Pact for the Environment. A Global Pact for the Environment is a project for an international treaty that seeks to recognize environmental rights and duties for citizens, states, and businesses.

I am deeply grateful to the American Society of International Law—especially to its president, Lucinda Low—and to the International Legal Studies Program at American University Washington College of Law—in particular, to the Dean of the College, Camille Nelson, and to its program director, David Hunter—for their generous invitation to deliver the nineteenth Annual Grotius Lecture. Grateful, but more than a little intimidated. Nobel laureates and heads of state, eminent judges and leading diplomats have given this distinguished lecture, but never, I think, a humble historian. As Isaac Newton might have said were he in my shoes, “[i]f I can see far, it is because I stand on the shoulders of these giants.”

In 2010, Haiti's 7.0 magnitude earthquake resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and more than one million homeless. This event recaptured the attention of international society regarding disaster-related governmental policies and legislation. In 2011, Resolution 7 of the International Conference of the Red Cross reiterated the urgency for states to be prepared to facilitate and regulate any international disaster assistance, using the Guidelines for the domestic facilitation and regulation of international disaster relief and initial recovery assistance (also known as the “IDRL Guidelines”). The International Conference adopted these guidelines in 2007; nevertheless, several countries did not implement the recommendations of the IDRL guidelines before the Haiti earthquake. Such was the case of Ecuador, which, after 2010, began to work on the implementation of the IDRL guidelines. In the beginning, public officials were very skeptical about the IDRL Guidelines as a tool for mitigating the consequences of disasters.

“In this context the proposition that tools are prolongations of human organs can be inverted to state that the organs are also prolongations of the tools.”