Source: Skirgård, Hedvig & CartoGIS at the College of Asia-Pacific at the Australian National University (2020) Map of Exclusive Economic Zones of Oceania. Distributed under Creative Commons BY-SA License. Published in Skirgård, H. (2020). Multilevel dynamics of language diversity in Oceania. PhD Dissertation. Canberra: Australian National University.
Global conversations on the environment connect with the oceans. The oceans, the forests, and Indigenous communities are key themes of the dialogue process that RAOEN is engaging with through active participation of Indigenous youth from Oceania and Asia in learning sessions on the climate crisis and COP30.
Next month, the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, the third global gathering on the ocean since 2017, wants to accelerate action on the planet’s oceans that dominate the formation of climate patterns and increase the extremes of carbon temperature absorption and growing acidification.
For the UN Climate Change Conference in November 2025 (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, the presidency of COP30 launched four leadership circles in April to facilitate discussions on climate finance, traditional and indigenous peoples and communities, climate governance, and global mobilization. This action seeks to leverage key issues on climate action and global mobilization through the four key themes of COP30: climate adaptation, climate finance, energy transition, and food systems.
The ocean was repeatedly defined during the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia in October 2024 as the “great connector” between biodiversity and climate change, recognizing its crucial role in maintaining global environmental balance. COP16 reinforced anew the need to protect biodiversity in the context of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss.
In a March 2025 letter to Parties and observers from the Co-Facilitators of the 2025 UN Ocean and Climate Change Dialogue, the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate was mentioned and how the IPCC report “underscored the importance of the ocean in supporting unique habitats and noted the interconnections with other components of the climate system through global exchange of water, energy, and carbon.”
The letter also starkly reminded the continuous warming of the ocean since 1970, absorbing 90 per cent of excess heat in the climate system, and that since the 1980s, the ocean took up between 20 to 30 per cent of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
There is still a great fear of bioeconomics that seems to be serving increasingly a sustained exploitation rather than protecting the integrity of the biodiversity and ocean ecosystems.
During the 2022 UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, RAOEN joined the Oceania Asia faith delegation and Archbishop Peter Loy Chong of the Archdiocese of Suva in Fiji addressed the assembly on the last day. In a reflection after his presentation, he shared the document, Theology for Vulnerable Communities, that speaks of communities throughout Oceania and their concerns.
Ongoing negotiations are still very far from an active response, and implementable options but the urgency grows. With this, RAOEN shares Archbishop Loy Chong’s 2022 UNOC theological reflection.
Theology for Vulnerable Communities
by Archbishop Peter Loy Chong DD (Archdiocese of Suva, Fiji)
Context: The UN Ocean Conference
Scaling up Ocean Action Based on Science and Innovation for the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14: Stocktaking, Partnerships and Solutions
The Ocean Conference, co-hosted by the Governments of Kenya and Portugal, comes at a critical time as the world is seeking to address the many of the deep-rooted problems of our societies laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and which will require major structural transformations and common shared solutions that are anchored in the SDGs. To mobilize action, the Conference will seek to propel much needed science-based innovative solutions aimed at starting a new chapter of global ocean action.
Solutions for a sustainably managed ocean involve green technology and innovative uses of marine resources. They also include addressing the threats to health, ecology, economy and governance of the ocean – acidification, marine litter and pollution, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and the loss of habitats and biodiversity.
I attended the 2022 UNOC through the Missionary Society of St Columban. I presented a 700-word intervention and a 3-minute verbal presentation at the plenary hall. I also physically attended some side events as well as two virtual events:
- Blue economy for the Pacific island countries – Leadership, capacity development and blue economy index
- Addressing water quality, models of good governance, and the climate crisis to enhance the resilience of coastal communities
- Launch of the Alliance of Countries for a Deep-Sea Mining Moratorium
- Currents of Political Change: Reviewing Our Common Heritage and Common Responsibility in light of the Climate Crisis and Dangers of Deep Sea Mining.
- Ocean Sand: Risks & Opportunities for Sustainability & Equity
- The Sea is Sacred: Religious Responses to Deep Seabed Mining
- Looming Dangers to Sustainable Development and Global Climate Justice: Drawing a Blue Line to Protect the Ocean against Deep Sea Mining
- Cultural and sustainable management of Islands blue economies and oceans ecosystems
- Action Plan for One Blue Ocean for One Blue Planet
- Participated as a panellist in the “Oceania Talanoa: Faith, Indigenous, and Nature’s Moana Shaping and Safeguarding Innovations of the Sea”
My choice of side events was guided by my interests in protecting the Ocean and empowering rural and coastal communities to protect the planet. Presenters and panellists repeatedly used this phrase regarding deep seabed mining: ‘There’s a lot we do not know – scientifically about seabed mining.’ Therefore, we need to allow for scientific study. The Conference focused on deep seabed mining without making references to mining that are already taking place, from the mountain, forests, riverbeds, and seashore. The conference paid a lot of attention on seabed mining and was silent on other forms of mining.
However, in my intervention, I pointed out there is a lot we know from peoples’ experience about mining, for example:
- Frequent landslides
- Loss of river and marine creatures
- Dirty river water
- Mud covering the seashore and coral
Mining is another form of colonialism. During the colonial days, our chiefs sold land in return for guns, alcohol, boat fare and other immediate convenience from westerners with little or no consultation with the tribe.
Today colonialism takes a new form. The colonizers are extractive companies that bribe their way through the government and traditional chiefs. Companies and corporations have power over local governments, local indigenous chiefs, and systems. This neo-colonialism and knows no boundaries. Debbie Anne Ngarewa-Packer (New Zealand and Maori parliamentarian) clearly points out the injustices incurred by neo-colonialists: ‘Those who make decision for us without us.’ ‘Prosperity of some has not been good for us.’
The language of the conference
Scientific, technology, academic, and finances dominate the conference discourses. A Gambian presenter stated we will continue to repeat our discourses because we fail address human beings who are resistant to change. He therefore argues for an anthropological language.
The Gambian presenter is correct, we need a correct language that touches the hearts and minds of human beings and bring about the change we want.
The conference allows little space for the voices of vulnerable communities. Pope Francis points out that the world needs to learn from indigenous communities because they know how to live in healthy interconnected relationship with creation. However, the conference gave little space for the voices of indigenous people.
Of the side events I attended, only one began with prayer and an indigenous acclamation. Theology as the language for God was silent. Not much space was given to the language of theology and spirituality. No reference was made to the creator of the planet and his plan.
God is silent. Victims of the climate change and destructive industries are silent as well.
A theology for vulnerable peoples
We need a theology for vulnerable peoples. To this end, I turn to Dorothee Soelle’s theology, God as the silent cry. Soelle argues that we cannot use the imperial languages and patriarchal for God like, ‘almighty and powerful God’ to vulnerable communities. She states vulnerable communities will find it difficult to talk about God as almighty and powerful amid their sufferings.
Soelle proposes a language for God as ‘the silent cry.’ God as the silent cry implies that God needs our collaboration to bring about salvation. God can not merely represent suffering peoples. Humans can not merely hand over their struggles to an almighty and powerful God. Rather, God needs our participation to bring about God’s rule. Silent Cry invites collaboration of stakeholders to protect Mother Earth.
God is revealed as the ‘silent cry.’ There are substantial references to this theology in the bible. Elijah meets God in the ‘sound of sheer silence.’ (1 Kings 19:11-). The prophet Isaiah (52:13–53:12) speaks of silent and suffering servant: ‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’
Christian tradition teaches that are saved by Jesus’ Passion. From the Last Supper, Jesus entered into his passion. He became passive. He was longer the actor, rather he was a victim of violence. Jesus entered his vulnerability. He was a victim of physical and verbal abuse.
The theologian Jon Sobrino argues that the Church has the responsibility of taking down the crucified peoples from their crosses.
Indigenous, spiritual, and experiential knowledge and language: we do not have to wait for the scientific knowledge to tell us that mining will harm the earth. Experiences of mining already tell us that mining destroys the web of life. Indigenous and spiritual knowledge tell us that everything is interconnected. Breaking a strand of the web of life has an immediate effect on the web as a whole.
Theologians argue that theology as the language has a symbolic structure.
Turn to theology’s symbolic language
Joe Holland and Peter Henriot: We need artistic language to bring about change.
Johannes Baptiste Metz: Narrative theology has the power to move into action –dangerous memories of Jesus.
Roger Haight: Theology has a symbolic structure.
Donal Dorr: The place for indigenous language in CST.
Avery Dulles: The communication of faith has a symbolic structure
Fr. Richard Rohr: … the need for symbolic and mystical language: “I suggest that we should be searching primarily in the universal and wise depths of recurring symbols, metaphors, and sacred stories, which is where human beings can find deep and lasting meaning – or personal truth.” (Rohr 67-68)
Symbols allow us to reframe, re-organize, and reset the core meanings of our lives again and again. Many have called our postmodern world “a crisis of meaning” a world where things do not mean anything. Humans cannot live happily without meaning – and ever deeper meaning. Symbols have the power to give meaning – the meanings we wake up for each morning. Religion should be a master at such mining for meaning. (Rohr, 73)
Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries – the turn to the subject, reason, and scientific knowledge
Dorothy Soelle: God as the Silent Cry: This is language of God that invites participation of vulnerable peoples.
Leonardo Boff, “Cry of the Earth and Poor”: a new language, new imagination, new politics, a new pedagogy, a new ethics, a new discovery of the sacred and new process of spirituality.
Turn to the Sacred: Reclaiming of the dimension of the sacred, true retrieval of the sacred; recover the sacredness of the earth.
Stories, myths, rituals, symbols: show connectedness to nature, how they relate and care for nature, how they view the Earth as an extension of life and body (125)
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: Argues that indigenous peoples have values that guide greater responsibility to caring for the Earth. Indigenous communities have a strong sense of community, readiness to protect others, a spirit of creativity, and a deep love for the land. They are also concerned about what will they eventually leave to their children and grandchildren.
Church’s pastoral action: Protection of Mother Earth and climate change action are moral matters
- Church must be the voice of God who is the ‘Silent Cry.’ We have to amplify the cries vulnerable victims of climate change and Mother Earth. The language of vulnerability has ‘exousia’. Exousia is a form of power that is based on vulnerability rather than physical strength.
- Provide information, feedback, guidance for vulnerable communities
- Information about co-options in all sorts of areas and discover the best of the technical world we inhabit
- God as the ‘Silent Cry’ calls for solidarity and participation of stakeholders to protect Mother Earth and vulnerable peoples
- To empower vulnerable communities, map their resource, know their resource, and value their resource in terms of biodiversity
- To turn to Indigenous knowledge and spirituality
- To counter the Environmental Impact Assessment discourse (EIA)
- To use a bottom-up resistance-change
Related stories:
RAOEN in UNOC: From the tides and currents in Lisbon, towards greater ocean action and justice
Archbishop Peter Loy Chong: Stories from the Ocean
Sr. Mariana Tevurega on protecting ecological integrity in Ba Province, Fiji (two-minute video)