If the majority of the world’s countries follow the same development path the Global North did, says Kumi Naidoo, “it’s game over.”
Not eventually — now.
We’re already in the first phase of catastrophe, he tells me, and the only question left is whether we can stop it becoming irreversible and runaway.
For the second episode of Climate Pilgrim, we spoke with Dr. Naidoo at the Raising Hope conference in Rome marking the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’, we meet the former Greenpeace International and Amnesty International chief, now president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Naidoo’s proposition is as morally direct as it is diplomatically radioactive:
the world must treat further fossil-fuel investment as it once treated landmines, poison gas, and slavery — as something that can no longer be justified.
It took twenty-eight COPs before the words “fossil fuels” appeared in a global climate text. Absurd, he says, but revealing. Because behind the technical language of climate politics lies a communications failure — one that even Arnold Schwarzenegger called out at the same Vatican conference. We’ve drowned people in acronyms instead of stories that make them care about their children’s lungs.
Naidoo was many years ahead of the curve in connecting the dots between human rights and climate justice. “There are no human rights on a dead planet,” he reminds us - an argument that he was one of the first to articulate in quite that way, and which found echoes in landmark climate documents from Laudato Si’ to the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion of earlier this year.
He also sketches the next act: in April 2026 Colombia will host the first diplomatic conference outside the UN system devoted to negotiating the treaty he champions. It echoes how the Landmine Ban Treaty began — not with the biggest powers, but with the most vulnerable.
Will Pope Leo XIV go to COP 30 in Belém next month — and will he endorse the treaty? Brazil’s climate minister Marina Silva publicly invited him. The crowd in Rome seemed ready to pack the Popemobile themselves. But the deeper question is whether faith communities, armed with Laudato Si’ and Raising Hope, can fill the moral vacuum politics keeps leaving.
Naidoo insists the planet doesn’t need saving; humanity does. Once we’re gone, the forests and oceans will recover just fine. The struggle now is for “our neighbours in vulnerable countries… and for our children and grandchildren who will ask why we failed them when the science was so clear.”
He still calls himself a “prisoner of hope” — echoing Desmond Tutu — but only if that hope is disciplined, urgent, and joined to action. Which makes him a fitting guest for Climate Pilgrim: a series about what happens when faith and climate collide, and what moral imagination might still be possible when the data says we’re out of time.
Intros and Outros
In case you’re wondering if we’ve gone all over-pious, for our theme music we went with Blind Willie Johnson’s God Moves Over the Water, which packs a bit of a punch if you listen to the lyrics:
