As world leaders prepare to gather in Antalya, Türkiye, for COP31 in November 2026, the global climate debate is once again being framed through familiar language: emissions targets, climate finance, adaptation, loss and damage, renewable energy and international negotiations.
But one vital source of law and moral reasoning remains largely absent from the dominant climate framework: Islamic jurisprudence.
This absence is not minor. It is a serious gap in global climate governance.
For more than 1,400 years, Islamic law has developed principles around stewardship, resource protection, water rights, land use, public welfare and accountability before Allah. Long before modern climate conferences began producing declarations and pledges, Islamic legal tradition had already treated the Earth as an amanah, a trust, not a commodity to be consumed without consequence.
That is why The Cambridge Handbook of Islam and Environmental Law, published by Cambridge University Press, is significant. The volume brings together scholarship on Islamic legal thought and environmental governance, presenting Islam not as a cultural reference point, but as a serious legal and ethical framework for addressing ecological collapse.
Edited by Nadia B. Ahmad, Saba Kareemi, Erum K. Sattar and Oluwakemi A. Ayanleye, the handbook argues that Islamic environmental jurisprudence has been excluded from the global climate conversation despite offering tools that are urgently needed today.
Climate Justice Is Not New to Islam
Modern climate policy often speaks about justice as if it were a new discovery. Islam has placed justice at the centre of human responsibility from the beginning.
The Qur’anic worldview does not treat the environment as a lifeless backdrop for human ambition. Creation has order, balance and purpose. Human beings are not absolute owners of the Earth. They are trustees who will be held accountable for how they used what Allah placed under their care.
Three Islamic principles are especially relevant.
The first is khilafah, or trusteeship. Human beings are responsible caretakers of the Earth. This responsibility does not belong only to governments or institutions. It applies to individuals, communities and societies.
The second is mizan, or balance. The natural order is not accidental. When that balance is broken through greed, waste, war or exploitation, the damage is not only technical or economic. It is moral.
The third is adl, or justice. No people should be forced to carry the burden of environmental destruction caused by others, especially when those same communities contributed least to the crisis.
These principles expose one of the deepest failures of the current climate system: the people suffering most are often the least responsible.
Many Muslim-majority and Global South communities face drought, flooding, food insecurity, polluted water, displacement and conflict-driven environmental collapse. Yet the legal and political frameworks that dominate climate negotiations have often been shaped by the very powers most responsible for historic emissions, military expansion and resource extraction.
What Islamic Law Brings to the Climate Debate
Islamic jurisprudence is not limited to abstract ethics. It includes practical systems that can inform modern governance.
The Islamic concept of hima, for example, historically protected communal land and natural resources from overuse. It recognised that some resources must be preserved for collective benefit rather than surrendered to private greed or market logic.
Islamic water-rights frameworks also offer a deeply relevant model. Water is not merely an economic asset. It is a shared necessity tied to life, dignity and public welfare. In a world where water scarcity is becoming a major driver of suffering and conflict, this Islamic legal legacy deserves renewed attention.
The handbook also highlights legal developments in Muslim contexts, including environmental litigation in Pakistan, where principles linked to dignity and public welfare have been used to make environmental harm legally actionable.
This is the key point: Islamic environmental law is not just heritage. It is governance.
It gives the world a framework built on accountability, restraint, public benefit and responsibility before Allah. These are precisely the values missing from a climate order that often allows powerful states and corporations to pollute, profit, negotiate exemptions and then offer inadequate compensation to the victims.
The Hidden Climate Cost of War
One of the most important arguments raised in the handbook concerns militarism.
Climate discussions often focus on factories, transport, energy systems and agriculture. But the environmental impact of war remains dangerously undercounted.
Military activity produces massive emissions, destroys land, poisons water systems, damages agriculture and leaves behind toxic waste. Yet military emissions have often remained outside binding international climate accounting because powerful states refused to subject their defence sectors to proper scrutiny.
This is not a technical oversight. It is a political choice.
Islamic environmental ethics cannot accept such an exemption. Under khilafah, no human activity is free from accountability. Under mizan, destruction of ecological balance cannot be justified by state interest. Under adl, it is unacceptable for the same vulnerable populations to be repeatedly bombed, displaced, polluted and then ignored in climate accounting.
The consequences can be seen across Muslim lands.
In Iraq, successive wars devastated ecosystems, including the Mesopotamian marshes, one of the most important wetland systems in the region.
In Afghanistan, abandoned military hardware and decades of war have damaged soil, water and landscapes already vulnerable to flooding and landslides.
In Gaza, the environmental catastrophe is inseparable from Israel’s military assault. Bombardment has destroyed wastewater systems, farmland, solar infrastructure, homes, roads and the basic foundations of civilian life. This is not only a humanitarian disaster. It is ecological destruction imposed on an already besieged people.
To call these effects “collateral damage” is dishonest. They are structural consequences of modern warfare.
Islam Rejects Destruction Disguised as Security
The modern world often accepts environmental destruction when it is carried out in the name of security. Islam does not.
Security cannot mean poisoning the land of the poor. It cannot mean destroying water systems. It cannot mean burning crops, contaminating soil, flattening neighbourhoods and leaving future generations to inherit toxins, disease and hunger.
In Islamic ethics, power is not self-justifying. It is accountable.
A state, army or institution does not become morally innocent simply because it claims strategic necessity. If its actions violate justice, destroy balance and betray the trust of stewardship, then those actions are subject to moral judgement.
This is where Islamic environmental law challenges the foundations of the current global order. It refuses to separate climate justice from military violence, occupation, resource theft and structural inequality.
The climate crisis is not only about carbon. It is about who has been allowed to destroy and who has been forced to suffer.
Why COP31 Matters
COP31 in Türkiye gives this discussion a timely political opening.
The summit will bring together governments, negotiators and institutions to discuss the next phase of global climate action. But if the same narrow legal assumptions dominate the conversation, the outcome will remain limited.
Islamic law should not be treated as decorative heritage or a cultural side note. It should be recognised as a serious legal tradition with principles that can strengthen climate governance.
This is especially important because many of the communities carrying the heaviest environmental burdens are Muslim communities. Their legal, moral and civilisational traditions should not be excluded from the frameworks designed to address their suffering.
The world does not need more climate language detached from justice. It needs accountability.
It needs a framework that recognises the rights of the poor, the duties of the powerful, the sanctity of water, the protection of land, the limits of consumption and the crime of destroying ecosystems through war.
Islamic environmental law offers exactly that.
A Trust Before Allah
For Muslims, the Earth is not ownerless. Its rivers, soil, air, animals, crops and communities are signs of Allah’s creation and part of a trust placed upon humanity.
When that trust is violated, the damage is not merely environmental. It is spiritual, legal and moral.
As COP31 approaches, the question is not whether Islam has something to say about the climate crisis. It clearly does.
The real question is whether global leaders are willing to listen to a legal tradition that has spoken about stewardship, justice and balance for centuries.
Because the climate crisis is not only a test of policy.
It is a test of amanah.
