In the film, “What is Owed?” there is an immediate sense that something is not right. A low hum, like the tone of a tornado siren or the buzz of a low-flying airplane, grows loud as images of an island beach shift out of view. Windswept palm trees are blurred in the background of a document, the text of which we only see in sections: “Request for an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the obligations of States in respect of climate change.” Then, archival footage of people of the Pacific Islands are sitting, silent, as if waiting for a determination. A white man in a barrister’s wig appears, positioned at a podium and speaking into a microphone. The world presented is one that is out of balance. 

Dec. 13 marks the final day of testimony to the world’s highest court regarding the world’s most pressing problem. For two weeks, representatives of 97 states and 11 international organizations presented their findings to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on two questions. The first asks what states’ obligations are for present and future generations to protect the Earth’s life-giving climate system from greenhouse gas emissions. The second concerns the consequences. Legally, what will states face for causing harm to the climate system? 

The presentations follow a March 2023 resolution by member-states of the United Nations asking the ICJ to weigh in on the issue of climate change complicity—to determine what is owed. In the coming year, the justices will produce an advisory opinion, a nonbinding yet consequential determination that will set the stage for future global climate litigation. 

“What is Owed?” interrogates the power systems at the heart of the climate system’s energy imbalance. The film was made in partnership with SITU, a New York-based social impact design firm, and will run at Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich, Germany, along with other “visual investigations” of state-sanctioned harm. 

“What is Owed?” is an arresting and pointed articulation of what and who is at stake as the Earth’s atmosphere warms and sea levels rise, visualized through the testimony of student leaders from the Pacific Islands, 3D renderings of the ocean, satellite imagery, and archival footage. If the viewer can sense in the film’s opening sequences that something is amiss—with who speaks and who is silent, with whose voice is amplified and whose is dulled by the sound of hurricane-force winds—the reason quickly reveals itself. 

We hear the voice of Joseph Sikulu, a Tongan man and the Pacific regional managing director of the international environmental organization 350.org. Archival footage is overlaid of soldiers disembarking a military ship onto the shore; of justices entering some far-away courtroom; and of ocean lapping up against rock, moving freely and untamed, as it is wont to do, as if its nature was not the very thing people of the Pacific Islands now ardently struggle against. 

Sikulu says, “One thing we know to be true is that we’re not all equals in the eyes of the law. There are those who have a different set of rules that continue to let them to pollute, hold up on our negotiations, [and] hold the finances that are needed by our communities in order to adapt and grow resilient in this climate crisis. But that doesn’t happen because the system is broken.”

Tonga, like other countries in Oceania, experiences sea level rise at a rate that’s almost double the yearly average of the rest of the world. A conservative estimate says that Tonga, which sits at zero feet above sea level, will see almost two and a half feet of sea level rise, an encroaching of the ocean that is unburying the dead, strangling coral reefs, and truncating life cycles of fish and marine mammals. Life on Oceania’s island nations is becoming more untenable with every percent increase in global warming. Even with a global commitment to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, the ocean is a carbon sink, meaning that it naturally absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades, emissions today foretell that sea levels will continue to rise for millennia even with the boldest climate action taken now. 

Seas are not just swallowing land, but whole histories.

Which is to say, “What is Owed?”—both the film and its legal catalyst—is not about perfection or stopping harm before it starts, but about justice and holding power to account. As seas rise, islands sink, engulfing the landmasses that have been home to the people of the Pacific Islands since time immemorial. 

Seas are not just swallowing land, but whole histories. The displacement of language, tradition, and cultural practice by climate change, sea level rise, and the protection of neocolonial practices that aid in ecological decimation is the existential death that, for many Americans, has been broadcast as a threat only. For many around the world, the threat is imminent: We watch as a civic leader from Vanuatu explains how the country is already preparing for life as a landless yet culturally rooted people by digitally archiving and documenting its culture. 

Suneil Sanzgiri, the film’s artist, later weaves in testimony from those affected most directly by climate change-causing actions. First, we hear the voice of a Marshallese woman whose exposure to radiation from American military testing prevented her from sustaining a pregnancy. Jumping forward in time, we hear from other witnesses to climate change, including young people from Fiji, Pakistan, and Vanuatu. The youth testimony is featured as video presentations, which were organized by the student leaders who brought the resolution before the U.N. in 2023, leading to this week’s presentations before the ICJ.

“This climate case is not just historic because it’s the first brought to the ICJ, but it’s historic because it’s literally rooted in history,” Sanzgiri told Prism. “It’s literally rooted in all of the sufferings of these people of the Pacific Islands, people committed and perpetrated by the imperialist West.”

By that measure, the presentations to the world’s court aren’t only attempts to prevent the lifeways of people of the Pacific Islands from becoming fossilized in history’s archives. Rather, they’re arguments for the determination of history itself: If climate change-causing emissions are ruled as justified and justifiable, then so is the suffering and disappearance of the world’s most vulnerable and resilient people. It’s a line of questioning that circles back to the original question: Do countries with fossil-fuel-based economies have a right to pollute? And if they don’t, what is owed to their victims? 

It’s not lost on Anjli Parrin that the dynamics at the heart of climate change are reproduced by the legal apparatus where claims are argued. Parrin is a Kenyan lawyer, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, and collaborator on “What is Owed?”

“A lot of the countries that are involved and a lot of the islands that are involved are at the periphery of U.S. empire,” Parrin said. It’s an empire that remains apathetic to climate action, last week arguing in its presentation to the international justices against further outlining of accountability metrics. 

“These are the same places where U.S. nuclear testing happened in the ’50s that wreaked enormous environmental devastation and tremendous violations of the right to health,” Parrin added. “They’re the places that are the front line of the kind of Pacific theater of war … which are now saying we are going to be world makers, we’re going to be lawmakers, and we’re going to change the way international law works.”

In addressing the two questions outlined in the 2023 resolution, the court is doing something it normally doesn’t: examine the past and address future harms at the same time. Parrin told Prism that usually the law is backward-looking: Violations are addressed in retrospect and the threat of harm is not legally objectionable. Perhaps art can be instructive, Parrin said, because it allows us to engage in future thinking and not simply wait for the future to arrive on our shores. 

This year, the world shot past the 1.5-degrees Celsius mark, the highest temperature the Earth can sustain before catastrophic ecological points of no return are reached. Without coordinated and substantive international action, that temperature is predicted to climb, and each percent increase represents a magnitude increase in harm.

“One of the things that we’re hoping to do is to say: It’s not too late, but we need to act now,” Parrin said. “There are still things that we can do that make this planet livable. You see people who are facing an existential threat saying, ‘We will not go down without a fight. We are fighting, and we are going to rise, and we’re going to win.’”

“What is Owed?” is currently on display as part of “Visual Investigations: Between Advocacy, Journalism, and Law,” an exhibit at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich, Germany.