Climate, Community And Social Justice In The Phillipines

A Filipino activist raises a slogan during a rally in Manila, Philippines on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2015 to criticize the agreement reached during the United Nations conference on climate change, Conference of Parties 21 (COP21) in Paris. Nearly 200 nations adopted the first global pact to fight climate change on Saturday, calling on the world to collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution but imposing no sanctions on countries that don’t.
A Filipino activist raises a slogan during a rally in Manila, Philippines to criticize the agreement reached during the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris in 2015. Aaron Favila / AP Photo
A Filipino activist raises a slogan during a rally in Manila, Philippines on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2015 to criticize the agreement reached during the United Nations conference on climate change, Conference of Parties 21 (COP21) in Paris. Nearly 200 nations adopted the first global pact to fight climate change on Saturday, calling on the world to collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution but imposing no sanctions on countries that don’t.
A Filipino activist raises a slogan during a rally in Manila, Philippines to criticize the agreement reached during the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris in 2015. Aaron Favila / AP Photo

Climate, Community And Social Justice In The Phillipines

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For island nations like the Philippines, climate change is an immediate threat rather than a looming one.

The country’s populist President Rodrigo Duterte recently opted into the Paris Climate Agreement, marking a stark change from his previous stance.

For the view from the ground, we turn to Pedro Walpole, Jesuit priest and director of research at the Institute of Environmental Science for Social Change in the Philippines. Walpole is one of some 90 contributors to Loyola University Chicago’s Healing Earth environmental textbook project.

Walpole, who lives in the mountains of Mindanao in the Philippines, tells us about the hardships climate change is causing people in his region and how the global community can help.