The low, dark clouds, the rumble of thunder, the flashes of lightning, and the rising wind-bending branches all indicate a powerful typhoon is approaching. That means danger, worry and concern for the thousands of small farmers and their families. It also means another week of loss, hunger, hardship and survival. City dwellers worry less with their strong buildings and water drainage systems to protect them. But living in a bamboo hut with a grass roof or flimsy metal sheet roofing is not secure against the force and might of the all-destructive typhoons and floods that frequently hit the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries.
The consequences of climate change are here. The Philippines endured 19 typhoons and storms in 2022; they are increasing in number. Every year they destroy harvests, houses, roads, and river embankments and they cause landslides, floods, death and destruction. Climate change continues to intensify because of the non-stop burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil to generate electricity. They must be replaced with clean, renewable energy plants.
Yet, wealthy and secure politicians and business leaders ignore the dire threat to the planet. They do not see or care about the gathering catastrophe that is engulfing the planet and hurting children above all else. Pope Francis does care and he has spoken out in strong criticism of the world order that does too little to stop global warming and save the planet. The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has warned in a new report that children are the most vulnerable to climate change.
The world temperature is coming ever closer to the tipping point of no return when the global temperature reaches 1.5 degrees hotter since the pre-industrial era and cannot be reversed. That is when one disaster will cause another in an unstoppable chain reaction of destruction. Humans have caused this, and the 10 richest nations are 70 percent responsible for it all.
Unicef’s report, ‘The Climate Crisis is a Child Rights Crisis: Introducing the Children’s Climate Risk Index’ is part of a research project that analyses how climate change is endangering children. Children are impacted by storms, floods and landslides which increases the risk of water-borne diseases and the loss of their possessions and flimsy homes. This also causes psychological stress and impacts their education and well-being. In other parts of the globe, drought kills children and people.
The Unicef report finds that “approximately 1 billion children” — nearly half the world’s 2.2 billion children — live in one of the 33 countries classified as “extremely high-risk.” The Philippines is 31 in ranking of this “high-risk” list of countries due to natural disasters caused by climate change. Ten industrial rich nations are responsible for 70 percent of the global emissions of CO2 that causes global warming and climate change. Just nine percent of the damaging CO2 emissions are caused by the 33 nations that are suffer most of the environmental damage caused by climate change.
Pope Francis in his most recent encyclical letter on climate change, Laudate Deum (Praise God), pinned the blame for the growing climate crises on the irresponsibility and uncaring attitude of big business and government officials that seek their own gain at the cost of the planet and the poor. “Our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing breaking point,” he writes. Pope Francis points out the irreversibility of the damage. “Some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible, at least for several hundred years, such as the increase in the global temperature of the oceans, their acidification and the decrease of oxygen.”
It is the higher temperatures of the oceans that greatly contributes to more frequent and more powerful storms and typhoons. When governments and industry leaders ignore the truth and continue to subsidise oil exploitation and promote fossil fuels, they cause climate disasters to develop. To promote fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, they slow down investment and development of renewable sources of energy like wind and solar power, geo-thermal, hydropower, bio and hydrogen power plants. They leave the problems unchecked and thereby, as Pope Francis says, risk “the probability of extreme phenomena that are increasingly frequent and intense.”
The Catholic Church has its ultra-conservative elements which Pope Francis refers to as “certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church.” For those in the Church and outside it that deny and ignore the crises of global warming and its effects, he warns them: “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativise the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident. No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest.”
The greed and exploitation of liberal capitalism has much to answer for. The money moguls and investment gurus that ignore the global crises must be challenged. Pope Francis challenges them: “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time.” Government and industry have to accelerate investment in the expansion of renewable energy projects. Instead of these natural forces of nature destroying us, we must turn them into positive, life-saving sources of clean energy, promoting life and the well-being of people, protecting children and the planet.
Columban missionary Fr. Shay Cullen has worked in the Philippines since 1969. In 1974, he founded the Preda Foundation, a charity dedicated to protecting the rights of women and children which campaigns against the exploitation of human trafficking and sex slavery.
