Category Archives: Climate Change

Christianity, Climate Change, Environment, Government, Society

Pope Francis’s new climate-change doctrine and encyclical…

CLIMATE CHANGE

For more than a year, Pope Francis and his close advisors have been preparing an environmental stewardship document called Laudato Si. The text focuses on the effects of climate change on human life.

The document has been issued in the form of an encyclical, one of the most formal statements the pope can make about Catholic doctrine, and it’s the first of his papacy. Last spring, he released another piece of writing on the topic of poverty, but it was a slightly less formal document called an apostolic exhortation.

This, however, is the first instance in which the environment has been the topic of an encyclical. No pontiff has ever issued a statement (about the environment) on this level. John Paul may have put it into a World Day of Peace message, but a World Day of Peace message is down the rung on the ladder of the hierarchy of Catholic documents. Benedict, too, gave a number of homilies and speeches on it, but never at this level.

In the document, the pope makes a strong case that humans are at fault for the degradation of the environment. ‘Numerous scientific studies indicate that the major part of global warming in recent decades is due to the high concentration of greenhouse gas … emitted above all because of human activity,’ he writes. His thinking on the environment connects with other major themes of his papacy, including care for the poor and the importance of human life. In the document, he writes that the heaviest impacts of climate change ‘will probably fall in the coming decades on developing countries. Many poor people live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to heating, and their livelihoods strongly depend on natural reserves and so-called ecosystem services, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.’ The effects on immigrants and refugees are also discussed: changing environmental conditions force them into a position of economic uncertainty in which livelihoods can’t be sustained, he says.

We should know that this encyclical is not a love letter to Greenpeace or any other environmental lobby group. Whilst Francis is embracing the idea of environmental stewardship, he’s doing so as a Catholic theologian, not a liberal activist. In America, the pope’s encyclical is being discussed in terms of U.S. politics, where a significant minority of most Republican voters and legislators deny the existence of climate change. Rick Santorum, a Catholic and former U.S. senator and presidential candidate, advised the pope to ‘leave science to the scientists and focus on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.’

Francis links his call for environmental stewardship to the Book of Genesis, and he repeatedly couches environmental degradation in theological language. ‘That human beings destroy the biological diversity in God’s creation; that human beings compromise the integrity of the earth and contribute to climate change, stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; that human beings pollute the water, soil, air; all these are sins,’ he says.

American Catholics may be a sizeable group, but they form a small contingent on the whole of Francis’s church. There are 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world, and nearly 40 percent of them live in South America. Sub-Saharan Africa is another area of rapid growth for the Church; demographers expect the number of Christians in the region to double by 2050 to nearly 1.1 billion, although some of those will be Protestants. Considering that Latin America and Africa are Francis’s two biggest ‘constituencies,’ it’s no wonder that the environment is a point of pressing concern for the global Church. Climate change affects those who are poor and live in developing countries much more intensely than those who live in the developed world. In coming out against climate change, Francis is continuing the theme and focus of his entire papacy – speaking for the world’s poor.

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Climate Change, Economic, G7, Government, Politics, United Nations

G7 summit: The communiqué indicates an agreement in striving for a low carbon economy…

G7 SUMMIT

At the summit on June 8 the group of seven leaders agreed to wean their economies off carbon fuels and supported a global goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they stopped short of agreeing their own immediate binding targets.

In a communiqué after their two-day summit in Bavaria, the G7 leaders endorsed the need for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions at the upper end, ranging from 40 to 70% by 2050 (and using 2010 as a basis). The range was recommended by the IPCC, the United Nations’ climate-change panel.

The leaders also backed a global target for limiting the rise in average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

The communiqué read: ‘We commit to doing our part to achieve a low-carbon global economy in the long-term, including developing and deploying innovative technologies striving for a transformation of the energy sectors by 2050, and invite all countries to join us in this endeavour.’

The G7 host, Angela Merkel of Germany, who was once dubbed the ‘climate chancellor’, had hoped to revitalise her environmental credentials by getting the G7 nations to agree specific emission goals ahead of the United Nations climate conference in Paris at the end of the year.

Whilst the leaders stopped short of agreeing any such immediate binding targets for their economies, green lobby groups nonetheless welcomed the direction of their agreements.

A statement given by WWF Global Climate and Energy Initiative, said: ‘They’ve given important political signals, but they could have done more, particularly by making concrete national commitments for immediate action… We had hoped for more commitments on what they would do right now.’

The Europeans had pressed their G7 partners to sign up to legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Russia Sanctions

A firm stance was taken on Russia and its involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Merkel said the G7 countries were ready, if necessary, to strengthen sanctions against Russia.

The leaders want Russia and Ukraine to comply with a February 12 ceasefire agreed in the Belarus capital Minsk that largely halted fighting in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

Mrs Merkel said: ‘We are also ready, should the situation escalate, which we don’t want, to strengthen sanctions if the situation makes that necessary, but we believe we should do everything to move forward the political process of Minsk.’

The communiqué specifically addresses the issue, and the leaders said they expected Russia to stop its support for separatist forces in Ukraine and by implementing the Minsk agreements in full. The sanctions, they said, ‘can be rolled back when Russia meets these commitments.’

Greece

The Greek debt crisis was discussed by the leaders as a group and also in bilateral meetings during the summit at the foot of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze.

Mrs Merkel said there was not much time left for a debt deal to keep Greece in the Eurozone and that Europe was prepared to show solidarity if Athens implemented economic reforms:

‘We want Greece to remain part of the euro zone but we take the clear position that solidarity with Greece requires that Greece makes proposals and implements reforms.’

‘There isn’t much time left. Everyone is working intensively… Every day counts now,” Mrs Merkel said.

Greece’s leftist government last week rejected proposals for a cash-for-reforms deal put forward by European lenders and the International Monetary Fund, but has yet to put forward its own alternative to unlock aid funds that expire at the end of June.

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Climate Change, Government, National Security, Politics, Society

The societal, cultural and geopolitical impacts of climate change…

CLIMATE CHANGE

CLIMATE CHANGE has been synonymous with polar bears and deforestation, but these days climatologists are paying more attention to people.

For many years now, climate change studies have tended to focus and rely on numbers-heavy charts and complex models to report on phenomena such as shrinking polar caps, melting glaciers and permafrost, caribou, the declining populations of reindeer and seal, as well as rising sea levels from Nigeria to the Maldives to the South Pacific.

In recent times, however, ethnographers, think tanks and sociologists have begun looking more closely at the social and cultural impacts of climate change on indigenous communities. Studies have been published on subjects including the Wauja people in Brazil (who have been impacted by the shrinking Amazon rain forest and industrialisation), Sami reindeer-herding communities across a warmer northern Scandinavia, as well as how the Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking tribes in the Kalahari Basin of sub-Saharan Africa have been affected. Of particular interest are the subsistence communities in Bangladesh and Malaysia whose coastal settlements are at continued risk of flooding from typhoons, monsoons and higher sea levels. Such research reflects a growing realisation in academic and policy circles that cultures and societies tied to nature have multigenerational knowledge that gives them special insight into changes in nature and the environment.

In the last decade or so, it has suddenly become apparent that the impact on people is really important and should be more than just an afterthought. There is undoubtedly an increasing realisation that climate change is more than a scientific artefact.

In 2014, Earth had its hottest year since weather record-keeping began 135 years ago. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, with nine of the total in the 21st century, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Recent studies show changes happening more quickly than predicted. The highly credible journal Science reported in March that the southern Antarctic ice sheet suddenly began losing its mass in 2009 at a steady and fast rate.

There is also growing interest in the geopolitical effects of climate change. The Brookings Institute, for example, estimates that for every percentage point rise in average temperature and drop in average rainfall, violent conflict between neighbouring states rises 4 percent, while violent conflict between groups within states climbs 14 percent. Scholars foresee, too, new shipping routes opening up as the Arctic ice cap shrinks still further, potentially leading to military conflicts. Russia, for instance, planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole in 2007 and has some 4,300 miles of Arctic coastline.

In violence-plagued northern Mali, a desiccated landscape of dust and mud huts where the average rainfall is a third less than it was nearly two decades ago, scholars recently blamed a climate-change induced drought for fuelling conflict between Tuareg separatist rebels (who need water and grass for their cattle herds), as well as government-backed forces. In March, the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed study stating that ‘there is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria.’ This was a devastating drought that led to widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families towards urban centres. Some studies suggest climate change will produce permanent refugees.

Last October the Pentagon published a report which said: ‘Climate change poses immediate risks to national security.’ Chuck Hagel, then defence secretary, referred to climate change as being a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases and armed insurgencies. And President Barack Obama picked up that thread in May, telling graduating cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that climate change ‘constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security’ as well as invoking how those threats will impact on how the U.S. military defends its country.

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