James Pochury
As governments, faith-based organisations, civil society groups, and international agencies gather in Bonn, Germany for SB64, the UN’s mid-year climate negotiations, conversations are taking place about climate finance, adaptation, loss and damage, and ecological debt. These conversations matter.
In Asia and Oceania, communities are already living with realities that demand urgent attention. Small island nations face rising seas. Indigenous Peoples continue to defend forests, rivers, and ancestral lands from extraction. Coastal communities confront increasingly unpredictable weather. Rural communities live with the long shadows of mining, pollution, and ecological degradation. The negotiations matter.
And yet I wonder whether the question that stayed with me from childhood still lingers beside many of our best efforts: Where is the conversation happening? And who are in it?
The conversation beside the truck
As a schoolboy in Meluri in Nagaland, I looked forward to the arrival of the truck from Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The bags of bulgar wheat would come. The tins of oil would come. The adults would gather. Conversations would happen between visitors and parish priest. Papers would be signed. The truck would leave.
Then, on Wednesdays and sometimes Saturdays, we children would sit together with folded leaves in our hands waiting for hot bulgar meals. We loved those meals. As children, we did not ask many questions. The food was welcome. The visits were expected. The system seemed normal.
What I remember now, however, is not the food. It is the conversation. Or rather, where the conversation happened.
The visitors would arrive. They would speak with the parish priest and two community leaders. They would discuss matters that seemed important. Decisions were made. The truck would leave. The food was for us. The conversation was not.
To be fair, we were children. Nobody was suggesting that a group of schoolboys should negotiate food security programmes. Looking back, there was nothing unusual about the arrangement. The people involved were generous, committed, and trying to help.
Yet decades later, a question from that memory still lingers: Why do conversations about people’s futures so often happen somewhere else?
Ecological debt is also a debt of listening
Pope Francis, in Laudato Si’, speaks of a true ecological debt between those who have benefited most from the exploitation of natural resources and those who bear a disproportionate share of the consequences. The phrase has become increasingly familiar in climate discussions.
But ecological debt is about more than carbon emissions and climate finance. It is also about distance between those who make decisions and those who live with them, those who design solutions and those who inherit the outcomes, between expertise and experience.
Years ago, a missionary sister who spent much of her life in a Naga village returned after a long absence. Looking at some village kitchens, she remarked with surprise that they seemed much the same as they did decades earlier. It was an understandable observation. Many of us were taught to associate progress with newer materials, modern designs, and greater consumption.
Yet her remark stayed with me because it raised another question. How do we recognise improvement? Is a kitchen more successful because it is newer, shinier, and resembles kitchens elsewhere? Or might there be wisdom, resilience, ecological intelligence, and cultural memory embedded in a smoke-darkened room lined with bamboo containers, woven baskets, bottle-gourd jugs, and skills passed across generations?
Communities have always changed and always will. The deeper question is whether change is measured against people’s own aspirations and wisdom, or against assumptions imported from somewhere else.
Ecological debt may arise not only when resources are extracted from communities, but also when confidence is extracted from their ways of knowing.
Listening to communities
Across Asia and Oceania, Indigenous Peoples, coastal communities, forest dwellers, and local faith communities carried the knowledge of ecological interdependence long before institutions gave it a name. They understood the relationship between land, water, culture, and survival before it became a framework. They did not need a new reality explained to them. They were already living inside it.
One of the great gifts of Laudato Si’ was that it helped many institutions to begin listening more carefully to what communities had been saying all along and that should not be underestimated.
Across the Church, there are countless examples of accompaniment, advocacy, formation, and solidarity that made a genuine difference. Many dioceses, parishes, religious congregations, and Church networks walked faithfully alongside communities facing ecological challenges. These efforts deserve gratitude.
But perhaps gratitude and honesty belong together, because ecological debt is not just about a debt of resources as it may also be a debt of listening.
This listening is not as consultation but as trust. There is a difference. Consultation asks people for their views. Trust allows people to shape the future. The distinction may seem small until one begins to see it everywhere.
Communities are consulted. Experts write reports. Projects are designed. Funding is allocated. Meetings are held. Statements are issued. And still, many communities remain in the position of waiting for the next truck, the next project, the next expert, the next intervention, the next conversation taking place somewhere else.
This is not because anyone intends it. Most people involved are acting with sincerity and commitment. Institutions often become very good at helping people. The harder task is learning how to trust people, trusting communities enough to lead, trusting young people enough to carry responsibility, trusting Indigenous knowledge enough to influence decisions rather than simply enrich discussions, trusting local faith communities enough to become authors of their own responses rather than participants in someone else’s plan.
The harder conversion is in relationships
The harder conversion before us is not in how we consume, travel, invest, or manage resources but in relationships.
It is a conversion from speaking on behalf of people to creating the conditions in which people speak with their own authority, from delivering solutions to nurturing confidence, from accompaniment that remains permanent to accompaniment that eventually becomes partnership.
As SB64 unfolds, important agreements will be negotiated. Necessary commitments will be debated. All of this matters.
But the deepest measure of progress may never appear in a negotiated text. It may appear when communities no longer wait for others to define their future, when a young Indigenous leader reads a policy document and responds with confidence, when a parish becomes a centre of local ecological action, when a village gathers not merely to receive information but to make decisions, when people discover that they are not simply beneficiaries of change but protagonists in it.
Looking back, I am grateful for the CRS truck that carried food, generosity, and solidarity. But perhaps the highest purpose of every truck, every project, every institution, every campaign, and every act of accompaniment is not that these keep coming.
The highest purpose is that these help create the conditions in which the people waiting beside the road become part of the conversation, and eventually help decide where the road leads next.
James Pochury is RAOEN’s Regional Coordinator for South Asia and shared his reflection during the opening week of SB64 or the 64th sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) taking place in Bonn, Germany from 8 to 18 June 2026.
RAOEN is the River Above Asia Oceania Ecclesial Network that accompanies faith communities across Asia and Oceania in their engagement with integral ecology, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and the journey toward ecological justice.
Photo above: The landscape of Naga Hills in northeast India carry knowledge, memory, and belonging that predate any framework