On climate change “the (Catholic, ed.) Church will not remain silent,” continuing, on the other hand, “to raise its voice together with science, civil society and the most vulnerable ones with truth and consistency until justice is done.” Such a commitment comes through the call to defend “indigenous and traditional peoples, ecosystems and impoverished communities.” Recognizing, in particular, “the increased vulnerability of women, young girls and the new generation” and looking at climate migration as a challenge “for human rights.”
These are the impactful words stated by the catholic bishops of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the document “Un llamado por la justicia climática y la casa común: conversión ecológica, transformación y resistencia a las falsas soluciones” (A call for climate justice and the common home: ecological conversion, transformation and resistance to false solutions), presented in early July in Rome. The paper, prepared by the three episcopal conferences (Secam, Fabc, CELAM) coordinated by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America (Pcal), looks at COP30, scheduled for next November in Belém, Brazil. As it criticizes, in particular, the “false solutions such as green capitalism” while arguing the need for a radical change in the economic system, “which replaces the logic of unlimited profit with integral ecology.”
The ecological debt
Explicitly inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ and by Pope Leo XIV’s call to address “the wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, fear of difference and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest,” the document specifically invokes the need for rich countries to pay their “ecological debt” to the nations of the Global South. This debt, the authors point out, has been created by resource extraction and greenhouse gas emissions and has created a clear paradox which is expecially evident in poorest regions.
“Africa is a significant example,” said Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, quoted by Vatican News. “It is a rich land, impoverished by centuries of extractivism and exploitation. The continent that pollutes the least yet pays the most expensive cost of global pollution.”
The ecological debts of the global North expected to reach nearly $200 trillion by 2050
COP29, the bishops recall, set a new $300 billion per year target for compensation funds of by 2035. A figure described as “insufficient in the face of the real needs for adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage.” The United Nations Environment Program, for example, “conservatively estimates that about $500 billion per year is needed for climate change adaptation measures alone.”
The target , moreover, “lacks a clear roadmap to ensure its affordability and alignment with the needs of the most vulnerable countries and communities.” In contrast, the bishops’ conferences say, according to a recent estimate by the University of Leeds and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, “the climate debt of the rich global North, which includes countries in North America and Western Europe, will reach $192 trillion by 2050.”
Here’s why EU Deforestation Regulation looks just like a sieve
Colonial capitalism goes green
The word “greenwashing” is never used in the paper. But its shadow, so to speak, seems to persist among the arguments. In the authors’ crosshairs, in fact, is “the green economy or, as many call it, the greening of the system,” defined as “a technical-instrumental logic at the service of the ecological restructuring of capitalism that expands its capacity for self-regulation while perpetuating systemic contradictions.”
But also the “financialization of nature” that transforms the latter into a set of “tradable goods” starting with the controversial “carbon credits, which allow big polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases.”
Highly criticized, finally, is the energy transition that feeds off natural resources, “devastates territories and sacrifices communities, especially in the global South.” The race for critical raw materials, in short, is described by the bishops as “unjust and predatory”, an exploitation that “reinforces colonial extractivism, turns entire territories into expendable zones, violates human rights and devastates nature in the name of a false sustainability.”
