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Caribbean Island residents ask the court to order Dutch State to take climate action

Residents from the Dutch Caribbean told a court Tuesday that the climate change has made the island of Bonaire unbearably dry and hot. They asked the judges to order Dutch state to reduce greenhouse gases faster.

Onnie Emerenciana (a farmer in his sixties) told the court the heat was bad for the elderly, the droughts were bad for the crops, and the rising sea level could wipe out the historically important slave huts that once stood on the beaches of the island.

Emerenciana, a district court judge in The Hague, said: "We are suffering under the effects" of greenhouse gas emission to which we barely contributed.

PLAINTIFFS WANT DUTCH TO TARGET NET ZERO BY 2040

Bonaire, in the southern Caribbean, is an ex-Dutch colony that became a Dutch special municipality in 2010. Around 20,000 of its residents are Dutch.

Eight named plaintiffs, joined by Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups, are calling on the Netherlands to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero in 2040, ten years earlier than its current plans. They also claim that the Dutch government is not doing enough to protect the island from rising sea levels.

Experts in climate change cases claim that the Dutch case is the first time the European Climate ruling of 2024 and the World Court's opinion from this year have been tested on a national scale.

If the Netherlands succeeds, they will have to raise their climate ambitions above the current European Union goals - setting new standards for climate action in Europe," Lucy Maxwell from the Climate Litigation Network said.

Michael Bacon, the plaintiffs' attorney, told judges that "effective climate policy is neither a political decision nor a choice. It is a duty and right."

The Dutch state's lawyers argued that courts should not be able to determine government policy.

Edward Brans, state attorney, said that the state has met its obligations to Bonaire through its climate policy and by achieving climate targets set jointly with the European Union.

There is still no date set for the ruling. (Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg. Ali Withers contributed additional reporting from Copenhagen. Alison Williams, Mark Potter and Alison Williams edited the article.

(source: Reuters)