Laudato si’ has been a great gift to the world, drawing on the deepest roots of Catholic tradition to address the challenges of the present moment. For Caritas, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical has helped articulate the connection between caring for the environment and caring for each other. It also gave us a framework through the Laudato si’ goals to create meaningful change.
Last year, we produced our own organisational Laudato Si’ Action Plan, laying out commitments across all Caritas Australia teams and departments to contribute towards minimising our carbon and environmental footprint as an agency.
Caritas Australia has seen first-hand the relationship between the environment and integral human development. The communities we serve are often at the forefront of the impact of climate change.
It has expanded and enriched our policies around partnering with like-minded organisations and informs our approach to climate justice as part of our advocacy work. In turn, we have been an active voice in calling for Australia to commit to its fair share of climate financing. This includes attending COP—the decision-making body of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—alongside our Pacific neighbours.
As an aid and development organisation, Caritas Australia has seen first-hand the relationship between the environment and integral human development. The communities we serve are often at the forefront of the impact of climate change such as drought, rising sea levels and soil salinisation, and increasingly experience the impacts of extreme weather events.
The climate crisis compounds the challenges of poverty and vulnerability. This is why we ensure that climate justice is a key aspect across our programming, ensuring the support we provide enables communities to strengthen their resilience to the ongoing climate crisis and prepare for weather events.
For example, the ’Sustainable Livelihoods for Indigenous People’ program in Bangladesh trains villagers to plan for floods, so they can secure their livestock and poultry. Strengthening their own capacity to respond respects their human dignity and protects their livelihoods.
Caritas Australia recognises that vulnerability to climate change is also shaped by social barriers. Women, girls and people living with disability experience greater vulnerabilities due to unequal power dynamics and social norms in the community. In one of our projects, Building Resilience and Climate Action in Timor-Leste, we are working to address the interrelated issues of climate change and gender-based violence—because food and income insecurity often go hand in hand with rising rates of violence against women and girls.
Through our Catholic Earthcare program, we are also accompanying communities in Australia to develop and implement their own Laudato si’ action plans. Using the 7 Laudato si’ goals that have been inspired by the encyclical, the Laudato si’ action planning process brings communities together to care for the earth and each other.
We encourage communities such as schools and parishes to consider how they can strengthen their connection with Australian First Nations people and organisations, how they can support other organisations who are working with marginalised people in our community, how they can choose suppliers and purchase resources to ensure slavery-free supply chains, and how they can meet the physical, social and spiritual needs of their community in times of natural disaster.
Laudato si’ has given us the impetus to take action, as individuals and collectively. It has also given us hope.
In this Year of Jubilee, Catholic Earthcare is promoting the Turn Debt into Hope campaign, which focuses on unjust debt. Many of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations are caught paying off vast sums that go well beyond the value of their original loans because of unfair terms. That forces them to prioritise debt repayments over the wellbeing of their citizens—including climate change adaptations and mitigations that they simply cannot afford to ignore.
Turn Debt into Hope has three main calls: reduce the debt burden through restructuring and cancelling unjust debts; prevent future debt crises by addressing their root causes; and reform the global financial system to prioritise people and the planet.
Laudato si’ is a call to ecological conversion, a transformation of both the head and the heart towards loving and caring for all creation. Laudato si’ has given us the impetus to take action, as individuals and collectively. It has also given us hope.
Pope Francis wrote: ‘Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.’ So, from a collective perspective, we can make a significant difference by resisting a throwaway culture and take daily actions to care for our common home and each other.
And we must speak up. The next chapter of Laudato si’ begins with us!
Banner image: Mangrove planting on Kiribati to help prevent erosion. (Photo by Zhi Yan, courtesy of Caritas Australia.)
