At the Durham University Third Annual International Conference on Just Transition to a Net-Zero World, Enzo Elia presented the paper “From Abstraction to Benchmark: Operationalising Climate Responsibility in Just Transition Governance”.

Across 2024-2025, the ICJ, ITLOS, and the IACtHR restated States’ climate obligations – but largely in abstract, fact-detached terms. Meanwhile, just transition commitments remain couched in the hedged vocabulary of climate diplomacy – “phase-down”, “as appropriate”, “in light of national circumstances” – language widely treated as a political given, beyond legal reach. Enzo’s paper asks how the courts’ holdings are made to bite: how judicial pronouncements on stringent due diligence become an operative benchmark against which national net-zero strategies are designed, monitored, and contested. Its claim is that, in strengthening climate responsibility claims, these courts have furnished more than a litigation threshold; they have supplied a governance standard that challenges the diplomatic euphemisms diluting accountability. Hence, the paper reconstructs an assessable benchmark of legal adequacy and examines how it operates in practice.