Category Archives: Official Development Assistance

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.

Empathy: a basic element of human decency

by Jim Hodgson

Back in the late 1990s, I travelled frequently by bus over the mountains between my home in Cuernavaca and my job in Mexico City. Even when the traffic was bad, the trip usually took less than two hours. The bus company almost always showed a film.

When not working or looking at the views, including the Popocatepetl volcano, I watched the movies. I can’t guess how many movies I saw without ever seeing how they ended. My friends and I joked about organizing a Pullman de Morelos film festival, renting or borrowing some of the movies, and just watching the last half hour of all of them to see how they ended.

Among those movies was a favourite of mine, Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Bille August, 1997). The shocking death of a small boy in Copenhagen opened a tale of conflict between corporate greed and the Inuit people of Greenland. But I never saw how it ended. 

Years went by and then, in a used bookstore in Strathroy, Ontario, I found the novel by Peter Høeg on which the film was based. It’s an excellent book with a satisfying ending. 

Among parts that have stayed with me was this:

“…[W]e read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.” *

Hmm. Empathy as a feminine virtue? Let’s see. Google offers this definition: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” 

To me, it’s a basic element of human decency. A measure of empathy is vital in action to transform the plight of those made miserable by any who abuse their power. To empathize doesn’t mean you have to agree with someone: just recognise their different circumstances. Maybe some of us would rather say solidarity.

“In a time when empathy is increasingly treated as a vice, we must not turn our backs on the world’s most impoverished,” wrote Andy Harrington after a recent visit to South Sudan. Harrington is the executive director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB), a Winnipeg-based NGO that enables food aid to reach people in need and communities to move toward food sovereignty. He said people are already dying because of Trump’s cuts to USAID, adding that Canadian support is more essential than ever. (Eight people in South Sudan, including five children, died as they tried to walk for three hours to seek treatment for cholera after U.S. cuts forced local health services to close, Save the Children said April 9.)

Elon Musk said recently that empathy is killing Western civilization. But it seems the far-right has been attacking empathy for a long time now. And it does so with some masculine archetypes.

“MAGA influencers have begun to talk of the tariffs as a way to make the United States ‘manly’ again, by bringing old-time manufacturing and mining back,” asserts historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack post on April 8. In these first three months of the disastrous Trump regime in the United States, she has found her way into my daily reading as she sets current events in historical context. She adds: 

In a larger sense, Trump’s undermining of the global economy reflects forty years of Republican emphasis on the myth that a true American man is an individual who operates outside the community, needs nothing from the government, and asserts his will by dominating others.

Associated with the American cowboy, that myth became central to the culture of Reagan’s America as a way for Republican politicians to convince voters to support the destruction of federal government programs that benefited them. Over time, those embracing that individualist vision came to dismiss all government policies that promoted social cooperation, whether at home or abroad, replacing that cooperation with the idea that strong men should dominate society, ordering it as they thought best.

The Trump administration has taken that idea to an extreme, gutting the U.S. government and centering power in the president, while also pulling the U.S. out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II. …

Now Trump is demonstrating his power over the global economy, rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rest in cooperation.

In less than 100 days, the Trump regime has dismantled that “liberal consensus” that at least regulated corporate excess, provided very basic social welfare, and promoted infrastructure. (This is not to ignore some of the United States’ greatest failures. Among them: slavery and Indigenous genocide, of course. But also not providing universal health care and maintaining racial segregated schools by underfunding the public education systems.)

* Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1997, pp.144-45.

Tomorrow: Karl Marx in the Rose Garden