Climate change is a natural disaster intensifier. It makes floods fiercer, hurricanes harsher, and droughts drier. The one thing the world doesn’t need are more victims of natural disasters. Like the father and his family during the 2005 Niger famine found hundreds of miles from the nearest feeding station, who told a journalist: “I’m wandering like a madman. I’m afraid we’ll all starve.” Or the mother during the same famine who lamented as she watched her young daughter die: “As far as I’m concerned, God did not make us all equal. I mean, look at us all here. None of us has enough food.”
One reason such stories should not simply touch us as compassionate individuals but rouse us as nations and as an international community is because of the scale of the impacts, which have important economic and security implications. Billions will be adversely impacted, so it’s in our common interest to overcome the causes and consequences of climate change.
Given that these impacts will fall hardest on the poor in poor countries, those who have done least and yet will suffer the most, it should not surprise us that the Bible speaks to our responsibility to help them.
In several accounts in the Gospels people ask Jesus what is the greatest commandment in the Law. In effect, they were asking: if there is one thing our lives should be about, what is it? What is the most important thing in life?
In reply, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4–5, something that observant Jews of his time recited in the morning and in the evening: “ ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ ” (Mark 12:29–30). Jesus immediately adds: “The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, ” quoting Leviticus 19:18. To make things perfectly clear, Jesus adds: “There is no
commandment greater than these.”
Why does Jesus add the second commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves? He does so because you can’t love God unless you love your neighbour, because while God loves you, He loves your neighbour, too. These two commandments joined together by Jesus are what the Church has called The Great Commandments, and from a Christian perspective they are what our lives should be all about.
At this point, according to the Gospel of Luke, one of the experts in the law asks Jesus a follow-up question: “And who is my neighbour?” This elicits one of the most memorable and loved of Jesus’ stories, the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man was robbed, beaten and left to die beside a road. Two religious leaders, first a priest, then a Levite, saw him lying there but failed to help him; then a Samaritan saw him, and came to his rescue.
During Jesus’ time Samaritans were considered by Jews to be heretical, treacherous half-breeds, and were regarded with utter contempt. By having the Samaritan be the one who demonstrated love by his actions, Jesus in effect says that everyone is our neighbour – even (or especially) others we hold in contempt. And furthermore, by having religious leaders fail to relieve the man’s suffering, Jesus implied that those of us who think of ourselves as religious, as doing the right things to please God, had better think again.
Here is where this parable intersects with climate change.
The priest and the Levite were not the ones who robbed the man. But the essence of love is the presence of good acts, not simply the absence of bad ones. By passing by on the other side and not helping the man in the ditch, the priest and the Levite made his plight worse and failed to love God.
On the other hand, we today, collectively, are in fact making the plight of the poor worse through our contribution to climate change. And knowing their plight and not doing what we can to help overcome it is like passing by on the other side – something no morally mature individual or nation can do. We must be Good Samaritans.
Part of rich nations acting like Good Samaritans when it comes to climate change is by providing sufficient funding and assistance to poor countries to help them do two things: (1) achieve sustainable and climate-friendly economic progress, and (2) adapt to the consequences by helping them enhance resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate impacts.
There are two complementary and sometimes overlapping ways to achieve adaptation, to enhance resilience and reduce vulnerability. The first is achieved by realising the poverty-reducing and democracy-increasing dimensions of freedom, something that traditional overseas development assistance (ODA) should be helping to foster. The second is achieved through projects, processes and mechanisms designed in whole or in part to address climate impacts. Both are needed. Neither can be neglected. Funding to help poor countries both
mitigate/abate and adapt needs to be new and additional, in comparison to traditional ODA as required by the Bali Action Plan.
That the rich countries have a moral responsibility and opportunity to help the poor countries grow in a climate-friendly manner and adapt to the consequences of climate change, and to reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions, there is no doubt. We have the means. Let us now summon the moral will to be Good Samaritans on climate change.
-- Rev Dr Jim Ball