Rising seas and environmental degradation are disrupting traditional Pacific practices, eroding Indigenous cultural connections and severing their relationships with ancestral lands and oceans according to an Indigenous human rights lawyer.
These devastating consequences are precedents behind litigation cases which Julian Aguon, an outspoken Indigenous Chamorro lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, says he is willing to test at the International Court of Justice.
The law firm from Guam has already represented Vanuatu in a campaign which led to the same court issue a landmark advisory opinion last year on the obligations of sovereign states to address the climate crisis.
"We brought that to the court's attention because these are rights' violations of the highest order - violations of the right to life, the right to culture, the right to self-determination," he told a Yale University environmental publication.
Mr Aguon will argue his Pacific clients have suffered "cultural" and "spiritual" damage which must be recognised as a violation of human rights.
He said testimony will demonstrate which climate change cannot be understood only through environmental or economic measurements.
"There's no way to translate the urgency and gravity of the climate crisis other than via firsthand accounts of loss and damage," he said.
The impacts of climate change on yam crops in Vanuatuan villages on Tanna Island has disrupted an elaborate four-day dance ceremony which has been instrumental for generations towards deciding on high chiefs where "ceremonies have not been performed in years".
He added the loss of these generational traditions has caused significant stress and threatened the future transmission of cultural knowledge.
"These are cultures that have grown out of a particular piece of soil - they're tied to their place and the life in it," Mr Aguon said.
"So, we're talking about a massive rupture to culture and to cosmologies."
It has become commonplace for Pacific communities to be forced to relocate over rising sea levels.
About 400 kilometres north-west of Port Moresby, residents of a village in Papua New Guinea have moved four times.
The Urama tribe, which traditionally lived at the mouth of the Kikori River which meets the Gulf of Papua, is bracing for further relocation.
It devastates the Urama who do not view the area simply as a place where people settled.
"According to their cultural teachings, it is one of the birthplaces of humankind," Mr Aguon said.
"To be forced to keep moving and retreating from your ancestral homeland...the stakes could not be higher."
Mr Aguon's legal firm is also challenging efforts to expedite deep-sea mining in waters off American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.
Indigenous communities argue they have cultural and spiritual connections which proposed mining would effect.
The current US administration has sea mine claims on these sacred sites.
"We're saying something much deeper: that certain cultures depend on the health and integrity of the ocean, of the deep-sea environment, and to authorise deep-sea mining in these spaces violates several of their human rights, including the right to culture," Mr Aguon said.
The International Court of Justice has challenged the legal landscape for climate action despite its own advisory opinion being non-binding.
"The opinion is an authoritative statement of what the law really is," Mr Aguon said.
The court considered the states' obligations under the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which also fall under international environmental law, human-rights law and the Law of the Sea.
