We’re collecting postcards to send to the Prime Minister, calling on his government to take action on issues that will help protect our planet.
Click here to sign the online version.
- Making the UN’s Loss and Damage Fund effective by paying enough money into it that it can give grants – not just loans – to help the world’s most vulnerable communities deal with the devastating impacts of climate change that are already being felt.
- Debt Cancellation for Climate to free up resources for climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, enabling heavily indebted low-income countries to invest in a sustainable future.
- A Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, laying out a binding global plan to end expansion of any new coal, oil or gas production, phase out existing production of fossil fuels in a fair and equitable way and ensure a global just transition to 100% access to renewable energy globally.
Here’s why…
Making the UN’s Loss and Damage Fund effective
The COP27 climate talks in Egypt in November 2022 led to an agreement to set up a ‘loss and damage fund’ to help low-income countries adapt to climate change impacts that are already happening or are inevitable even if we stop greenhouse gas emissions immediately.
The COP28 climate talks in Dubai agreed to ‘operationalise’ the fund, but without any clarity on who will provide how much money and by when. The world’s wealthier countries, including the UK, have provided nowhere near enough money to make a real difference: at COP28, $700 million was pledged by rich countries, representing 0.2% of the value of the losses which low-income countries are facing every year because of global heating.
Funds are usually being provided as loans rather than grants, and often the money announced as going to help with loss and damage is simply being taken out of existing aid budgets rather than adding to them.
The UK pledged $75 million, but this was taken from an existing climate finance pledge. Wealthy countries need to provide all that is needed immediately as new grant money, in addition to continuing with other forms of support.
The Loss and Damage Fund is supposed to be in addition to funds necessary to help low-income countries take action to take other forms of climate action. In 2009, global climate talks agreed on ‘mobilising’ $100 billion a year for developing countries to take climate action, both to adapt to climate change and cut emissions.
The money is supposed to come from wealthier countries, through bilateral, regional and multilateral channels, as well as private funds generated by public interventions. Funds can flow through a variety of mechanisms, such as grants, loans and even insurance.
So far, however, the $100 billion goal has not been reached, and the distribution of funds has not been equitable. In 2020 developed countries provided $83.3 billion. Only 8% of this total went to low-income countries and about a quarter to Africa, even though both are highly vulnerable to climate change and home to the majority of people in poverty.
Debt Cancellation for Climate
Cancelling debts for low-income countries would free up funding for governments to spend on measures such as flood defences to protect communities most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
Much of the so-called debt is in any case illegitimate. Countries in the Global North have, in recent centuries, invaded other regions of the world, plundered their resources, re-oriented their economies, impoverished their people, created division, fostered elitism, installed favourable regimes and repressed dissent.
By doing so, they have profited enormously. Institutions in the Global North then lend money (effectively, stolen money), at interest, to regimes in the Global South which at times lack popular legitimacy. Periodically, under public pressure, these institutions ‘forgive’, or more often ‘restructure’, the ‘debt’, when what is required is an unconditional writing off of these debts and the payment of reparations for colonialism, imperialism and ecological destruction.
In the document announcing the Church’s Jubilee Year 2025, Spes Non Confundit, section 16 paragraph 2, Pope Francis says: ‘Another heartfelt appeal that I would make in light of the coming Jubilee is directed to the more affluent nations. I ask that they acknowledge the gravity of so many of their past decisions and determine to forgive the debts of countries that will never be able to repay them.
More than a question of generosity, this is a matter of justice. It is made all the more serious today by a new form of injustice which we increasingly recognize, namely, that “a true ‘ecological debt’ exists, particularly between the global North and South, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time”. [9]
As sacred Scripture teaches, the earth is the Lord’s and all of us dwell in it as “aliens and tenants” (Leviticus 25:23). If we really wish to prepare a path to peace in our world, let us commit ourselves to remedying the remote causes of injustice, settling unjust and unpayable debts, and feeding the hungry.’
A Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
The agreement at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai in November 2023 at last made clear that if we are to combat climate change, we have to move away from fossil fuels. Despite this, many governments are still approving new coal, oil and gas projects — threatening our chances of limiting warming to 1.5ºC.
We need a concrete, binding plan to end the expansion of new coal, oil and gas projects and manage a global transition away from fossil fuels. To protect people from the threat fossil fuels pose to our climate, our health and our future, a growing number of countries are seeking a negotiating mandate for a Fossil Fuel Treaty.
The proposed treaty would complement the Paris Agreement by providing the global roadmap needed to halt the expansion of fossil fuel, manage an equitable phase-out of coal, oil and gas, and lay the foundations for a true just energy transition in which no worker, community or country is left behind.
Addressing only emissions reductions and demand without fossil fuel supply has allowed countries and companies to claim to be climate leaders while continuing to open, approve and fund new fossil fuel projects.
Global treaties are successful in facing global threats like nuclear weapons or landmines, and can be negotiated quickly in face of a crisis. Momentum is building behind the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty proposal, now spearheaded by a growing bloc of 13 nation-states – Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Tonga, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Niue, Antigua and Barbuda, Timor-Leste, Palau, Colombia, Samoa, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands. The initiative is supported by many faith organisations, including Catholic organisations.
For more information, see https://fossilfueltreaty.org/