Category Archives: debt

Catholic bishops from Latin America, Africa and Asia demand climate justice

by Jim Hodgson

In a new document, Catholic church leaders from across the Global South blasted the “openly denialist and apathetic stance” of “so-called elites of power” in the industrialized world who pressure their governments to back away from much-needed mitigation and adaptation measures.

Preparing for the next United Nations climate change gathering, COP30, which will take place in November in Brazil, conferences of bishops from Asia, Africa and Latin America (FADM, SECAM and CELAM respectively) published a joint document entitled A call for climate justice and the common home: ecological conversion, transformation and resistance to false solutions. (You can download the document here.)

It’s the first time the three regional bodies have created a joint statement. The document offers an expansive vision for the U.N. climate conference. “At COP30, we demand that States take transformative action based on human dignity, the common good, solidarity and social justice, prioritising the most vulnerable, including our sister Mother Earth,” the bishops said.

They described the U.N. climate gathering as a moment for the church “to reaffirm its prophetic stance.”

Part of the 32-page document states:

Our demand

The climate crisis is an urgent reality, with global warming reaching 1.55°C in 2024. It is not just a technical problem: it is an existential issue of justice, dignity and care for our common home.

The science is clear: we must limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid catastrophic effects. We must never abandon this goal. It is the Global South and future generations who are already suffering the consequences.

We reject false solutions such as ‘green’ capitalism, technocracy, the commodification of nature, and extractivism, which perpetuate exploitation and injustice.

Instead, we demand:

Equity: Rich nations must pay their ecological debt with fair climate finance without further indebting the Global South, to recover losses and damages in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania.

Justice: Promote economic degrowth and phase out fossil fuels, ending all new infrastructure and properly taxing those who have profited from them, ushering in a new era of governance that includes and prioritises the communities most affected by the climate and nature crises.

“I am raising a voice that is not mine alone, but that of the Amazonian peoples, of the martyrs of the land—we could say of the climate—and of the riverside, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant and urban communities,” said Cardinal Jaime Spengler, archbishop of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil and president of CELAM. He was speaking at a news conference July 1 at the Vatican.

Vatican News reported that Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Vatican’s human development office, spoke spontaneously in the news conference to point to the document’s connection to the legacy of Pope Francis. “Ten years ago, I wonder if there is anyone who could have imagined this press conference as a fulfilment and implementation of Laudato si’. This is an extraordinary expression of what Pope Francis has called for and what Pope Leo is continuing to underline and call. I am grateful,” he said.

WCC begins Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action

In Johannesburg ten days earlier, the World Council of Churches launched its Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action.

During a plenary session June 21 of the WCC central committee, church leaders from six continents shared reflections and urged action for climate justice.

The plenary emphasized the biblical concept of jubilee as a framework for systemic transformation—a key foundation of the Ecumenical Decade. Speakers called for churches to move beyond charitable responses toward addressing root causes of climate injustice, particularly the disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities.

“Our lifestyle consumes 1.8 times what Earth can renew. Economic transformation must begin in the heart; theology must shape discipleship and discipleship must shape the world,” said Rev. Dr. Charissa Suli, president of the Uniting Church in Australia, during a theological reflection on “Jubilee for People and Earth.”

[When I shared Dr. Suli’s comment on Facebook several days ago, my colleague and friend Mark Hathaway pointed out: “In the Global North, it is more like 4.5 times what the Earth can renew—and even higher in the U.S. and Canada (I think about 6 times). The richest 10-20 per cent of humanity is responsible for most consumption and most GHGs [greenhouse gases] and a mere 100 large corporations are responsible for 70 per cent of GHGs.”

WCC has held previous ecumenical decades in the past, including The Ecumenical Decade of the Churches in Solidarity with Women (1988-1998) and The Ecumenical Decade to Overcome Violence (2001-2010).

Vatican’s Jubilee commission urges systemic change as it launches new debt relief report

A Vatican-backed report authored by more than 30 prominent economists calls for urgent action and systemic reforms to address the global debt and development crises of our times.

The group, convened by the late Pope Francis for this Jubilee year, provides recommendations on debt relief and economic policy.

What follows is (mostly) from a news releases today by Jubilee USA and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University:
“This report is a blueprint to solve the current global debt crisis, prevent future economic crises and create an economy that radically reduces poverty,” said Eric LeCompte, executive director of the Jubilee USA Network and a Vatican advisor who is at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) for the report launch. 

“While debt relief and a just economy are at the center of Catholic teaching, this is the first report convened by a Pope that focuses on technical recommendations to achieve an economy that serves everyone,” he added.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and former Argentine Minister of the Economy, Martín Guzmán, led the work of the expert group.

The report “seeks to contribute to a comprehensive rethinking of the global rules governing finance, taxation, trade, and the sharing of knowledge,” said PASS. “At its heart lies a clear and urgent goal: to help build a global economy that serves people, especially the most vulnerable, and truly leaves no one behind.”
Pope Francis reiterated the interfaith calls of Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II on debt relief and economics, making these issues the focus of the Christian holy year of Jubilee 2025. Pope Leo XIV continues the efforts of his predecessors. 

Twenty-five years ago in Jubilee 2000, over $100 billion in international debt was cancelled, but a lack of structural reform, combined with recent world events, resulted in systemic vulnerabilities that are now undermining hard-won gains. 

The time for new Jubilee action is now.

Recommendations include:

  • Improve debt restructuring: Change multilateral institution policies and legislation in key jurisdictions so that creditors and debtor governments are newly incentivized to agree to more timely and sustainable debt restructurings.
  • End bailouts to private creditors: Multilateral institutions including the International Monetary Fund should change their policies and practices to support sustainable recoveries, not de facto bailouts of private creditors or crippling austerity.
  • Strengthen domestic policies: Developing countries should more extensively use capital account regulations to discourage destabilizing flows and create a more stable environment for long-term investments and should invest in structural transformation.
  • Enhance transparency: All should support financial policies that are transparent and have broad societal support.
  • Reimagine global finance: All should support a comprehensive change in global financing models to drive financing for sustainable development, including lending that supports long-term growth.

The report’s findings will be discussed at the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville, Spain, June 30-July 3 and other global gatherings where the global debt and development crises will be high on the agenda.
“Developing countries spent a record $1.4 trillion paying debt in 2023 and too many countries spend more on paying debt than they do on the urgent needs of their people,” said LeCompte who also serves on United Nations debt expert groups. “In African and low-income countries, debt payments are two-thirds higher than their combined spending on health, education and social services.”
According to the World Bank, more than 800 million people live in extreme poverty, over 100 million more than previously believed. The report calls for a range of reforms as a debt and poverty crisis that has been growing in the face of the pandemic, wars, cost-of-living and interest rate hikes rose to prominence in the agenda of global leaders in multiple forums. Proposals include greater transparency, reforms to the International Monetary Fund, changes to laws in New York and the United Kingdom which govern private sector debt, improving debt contracts and an international bankruptcy system akin to the national bankruptcy courts that exist in most countries.
“This report can move the G7, G20, IMF and United Nations to make short-term decisions to address the current crisis and lay a foundation to prevent future crises,” stated LeCompte.
“The experts who wrote this report are a critical part of the global Jubilee movement, which includes advocates in pews, development groups, conservatives, liberals and people of every faith,” shared LeCompte. 

Read or download the report here or here.

Read Pope Francis’ Jubilee 2025 debt focus speech here.

Time to end the hypocrisy on global debt

by Jim Hodgson

“From collapsing ecosystems to collapsing economies, our communities have been battered by a storm of climate chaos, debt distress, deepening inequality, and systemic exploitation. These crises are the direct result of a global economic system built to extract from our lands, our people, our futures—so the rich and powerful can thrive off our suffering.”

That was the message May 29 of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), a Manila-based network that calls for change in debt, climate, economic and development systems.

In June 2024, Pope Francis and other church leaders around the world launched a new Jubilee campaign for debt cancellation. In Canada, the call is taken up by KAIROS, the Canadian Council of Churches and by Development and Peace (D&P) — among others. KAIROS launched a “Turn Debt into Hope” Jubilee 2025 petition that by June 13 had been signed by more than 36,400 Canadians.

Promoters of the campaign gathered for a People’s Forum in Calgary this past weekend ahead of the G7 summit and joined Sunday’s protests in the heart of the city. The Catholic Register reported on the event:

Salome Owuonda, executive director at the Africa Centre for Sustainable and Inclusive Development (Africa CSID), spoke about the consequences of crushing debt in Kenya…. She told participants that in her East African country “50 per cent of revenue generated is directed toward paying debt” and that puts health care, education, climate action and food security at risk. “And things are not getting better,” said Owuonda. “The government is calling for more taxes as they have to try and pay the debt.”

Dean Dettloff, a research and advocacy officer at D&P, shared that over “3.3. billion people in the world live in countries that spend more paying the interest of their debt than health care and education.” He added that many nation states also direct more funds to these expenditures than safeguarding the environment.

Tarek Al-Zoughbi, a Palestinian Christian who serves as the project and youth coordinator at Wi’am: The Palestinian Conflict Transformation Centre in the West Bank, spoke about the suffering in Gaza and many countries around the world.

Al-Zoughbi said that during this Jubilee year, we “must begin to recognize this image of God that is in each of us and that is in the spirit of creation.” He called for an end to environmentally exploitative practices that contribute to ecological debt. 

Some readers will recall the the Millennium Jubilee of 2000, which mobilized millions globally to demand debt cancellation for nations in the Global South. KAIROS reminds us:

In Canada, this movement took shape as The Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative, the country’s most successful faith-based advocacy campaign. This powerful campaign, led by church-based justice organizations, KAIROS’ predecessor coalitions, and the Canadian Council of Churches, played a crucial role in achieving over $100 billion in global debt relief.  

Yet, 25 years later, a worsening global debt crisis continues to affect vulnerable populations, exacerbated by rising interest rates, climate change, and economic inequality. An unacknowledged “ecological debt” owed by the North to the South and Indigenous Peoples further exacerbates the crisis.

Global “Financing for Development” system is part of the problem

When Pope Francis launched the new Jubilee debt campaign a year ago, he called for a “new international financial architecture” that breaks the financial-debt cycle that has contributed to a current global debt now estimated at $313 trillion. 

That APMDD statement that I referred to above presses hard on that global financial architecture, describing a “rigged system” that favours creditors. It criticizes the Financing for Development (FfD) process, which was created to ensure fair and just financing for development and climate action—especially for the Global South. “Instead, it has become another space for the Global North to rewrite the rules to protect their power, shirk their responsibilities, and advance false solutions. Their hypocrisy is most glaring when it comes to climate finance.”

At the end of June, world leaders will gather in Seville, Spain, for the fourth international conference on financing for development, dubbed FfD4. (I attended an ecumenical pre-event at the first FfD conference in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002 and wrote about it here.) In recent months, negotiations on the outcome document have sparked intense civil society campaigning. 

The Global Policy Forum said June 17 that the final draft retains an intergovernmental process for managing debt, but weakened its mandate to making “recommendations”. Critics argue that this could kill whatever hope remains for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as “debt crises strangle fiscal space and derail the implementation of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.” Global Policy Forum describes some of what is gone from the outcome document (referred to now as the “Compromiso de Sevilla”):

The paragraph on phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (27i) has been deleted entirely, as well as the specification of asset types to be covered by national and global asset registries (28g). The language around the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Convention was also softened just two months before the first round of negotiations starts: “We support” was downgraded to “we encourage support” (28b).  A similar change occurred in the paragraph on investor-state dispute settlement, where the “we undertake reform” was replaced by “we support efforts to reform” (43l).

Meanwhile, the rich countries led by the United States are cutting international aid and increasing their military spending.

The G7 meeting near Calgary issued a series of statements (CBC, left) but one searches in vain for anything about debt cancellation or development assistance. The statement on “migrant smuggling” fails to address the question of why people leave their homes or how development aid and peace-making strategies can ease the problem.

The APMDD statement concludes:

“We are here to expose the Global North—not just for failing to deliver climate finance, but for actively sabotaging it in bad faith. This is no accident. It is a calculated strategy to protect their profits and deny justice to those they have exploited for centuries…. We see through every lie. We reject every excuse.”