In 2023, the United Nations General Assembly requested the International Court of Justice to deliver an advisory opinion on state’s obligations concerning climate change, which has now become a turning point for climate justice. On paper, this move promises to clarify how international law grapples with environmental protection, human rights and inter-generational equity. Yet, the road to the Hague is littered with the stumps of forests cut down in the name of economic development in the Global South. Forests are sacrificed not only for development but also to the built structures of standards of economic development set by imperialism. To understand what is at stake in ICJ today, one must have to trace the chainsaws by going back to the empire, back to forests that were the first victims of imperial ambitions.
This blog examines that the development, defined through western lenses of industrialization and economic growth, continues to privilege extraction over ecological integrity by contending firstly, that colonial practices institutionalized dispossession & converted ecosystem into instruments of empire, secondly, post colonization, India & other Global South countries internalized & perpetuated this imperialistic rationality through large scale forest diversions & extractive developmental projects and lastly, that the ICJ’s opinion on climate justice offer both an opportunity and challenge to rupture this legacy by harmonizing inter-generational equity, indigenous rights, and differentiated responsibilities into international environmental law.
Colonial Roots of Environmental Degradation
When the British consolidated power in India, forests were not seen as ecosystems or homes to communities, but as warehouses of timber. The Indian Forest Acts of 1865, 1878, & 1927 criminalized century-old practices of forest use, stripped indigenous communities of customary rights, and handed over control to colonial administrators. From forced Indigo cultivation in Bengal to rubber plantations in Vietnam, European powers transformed bio-diverse ecosystems into mono-cultures tailored for imperial markets. In the process, landscapes were redrawn, livelihoods erased & entire communities turned from custodians of forests into trespassers in their own lands.
Forests, which were once integral to the survival of indigenous communities, were exploited as “resources” for economic extraction. Today, the Forest Rights Act attempts to undo the colonial legacy by restoring community ownership, but implementation remains weak & contested, again due to inherited imperialistic practices. These are not isolated fights but connected human rights, indigenous self-determination, planetary survival, climate justice & inter-generational equity issues.
The idea that developing countries like India must share the blame for heating the earth and destabilizing its climate, as espoused in a recent study published in the United States by the World Resources Institute in collaboration with the United Nations, is an excellent example of environmentalcolonialism.
As Vandana Shiva remarks, “the history that is being forgotten is that it was the emergence of an earlier globalism, in the form of colonialism, that created the setting for environmental degradation in the Third World.” Singling out developing countries as a main source of the threat to the global environment obscures the fact that the ecological stress on the global commons has, in large part, been caused by the North. It is immoral for developed countries to preach environmental constraints and conditionalities to developing countries. They must first set their own house in order. The global environmental agenda, as it is being framed by the North for the Global South, must be questioned. The agenda itself has become politics.
Forest Grabs in Contemporary India
The tragedy is that the story didn’t end with independence. Post-colonial states often inherited & reinforced these exploitative ideas & practices based on imperialistic rationality. Fast forward to the 21st century in India, and the activities of huge infrastructure, mining, and energy projects tend to justify themselves under the guise of “national development”. They carry the same DNA as colonial forestry of treating forests as raw material & indigenous people as obstacles to development.
The hypocrisy is staggering where forests of the global south are treated as planetary lungs for the north, but their communities are left gasping for justice. What makes this chainsaw of imperial rationality even more harmful is that it has been internalized. The very States that once suffered under colonial forest grabs now replicate the same extractive mindset against their own indigenous communities and ecosystems instead of breaking down the structures of dispossession.
Across the Global South, governments use development or national interest to justify forest diversion. For example, the Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2023, for example, relaxes the diversion of forestland for strategic and developmental schemes. The Karnataka Forest Department permits exploration of iron & manganese ores in Nirthadi Reserve Forest, diverting 64.7 hectares of forest. A green advisory panel approved to divert 109 hectares of protected forest in West Bengal for a new coal mine & also to de-notify reserve forest land in Telangana for the relocation of the community. In Chhattisgarh, the Forest Department has allowed diverting 1742.60 hectares of dense forest land in the Hasdeo Arand Belt (biodiversity spot) for coal mining. Between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2025, 78,135.84 hectares of forest land were formally approved for diversion for non-forest use across India.
The Supreme Court of India recognized climate justice as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The court held that without a clean, stable environment, the rights to life, health, equality & dignity remain hollow, especially for indigenous communities already bearing the brunt of ecological damage. However, the court till now has failed to impose reparative obligations on historical polluters & the State, who are no one but the puppets of imperialistic rationality of development, weaponizing the climate injustice in the Global South. It shows the limit of law when it comes to structural injustice.
Meanwhile, the Global North lectures the South on carbon emissions while relying on them as offsets for its own high-consumption lifestyles. In Indonesia, mega food & bio-ethanol estates threaten millions of hectares of rain forest & indigenous land for renewable energy or food security. The World Bank’s own arm, the IFC, meant to promote sustainable programmes, has financed palm oil plantations that drove vast deforestation in Indonesia. In Brazil, carbon credit projects sold to multinationals were backed by landowners previously fined for illegal logging. These modern forest appropriations are not singular national policies. They fit into a broad global trend in which Global South states, under the pressure of debt and development priorities, are compelled to trade forests for capital. Thus, despite decades of struggle, these patterns of extraction show that colonial rationality of development continue to shape forest governance & dispossession in India & across Global South. But the fight over forests is no longer confined to national courts & is unfolding on an international stage, where the future of climate justice is being contested in real time.
In Part II of this piece, the analysis turns to the international legal arena, engaging critically with the ICJ advisory opinion to interrogate its doctrinal foundations & practical limits by unpacking the opinion’s interpretation of erga omnes obligations, due diligence, and differentiated responsibilities.
Shivam Singh and Priyanshi Jain are fourth-year law students at Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur.
Picture Credit: Image by Biswarup Ganguly on Wikimedia Commons
Jindal Forum for International and Economic Laws 
