“What have we done wrong, to make God angry at us? We have no military power. It’s just communities living peacefully on their home islands. But we face this existential threat. For us, the difference between 1.5°C and anything beyond is the difference between survival and erasure.”
— Maina Talia, Climate Minister of Tuvalu
What does it mean to admit that we’ve failed?
We built a whole culture around not doing it. Whether it’s corporate PR or personal pride, we are trained to avoid saying the words I broke my promise. Whole industries exist to soften that truth, to hide it behind phrases like “delays,” “unforeseen circumstances,” or “adjusted targets.” But there are moments when clever words won’t do—when you have to look someone in the eye, someone you promised to take care of, and confess that you didn’t keep your word.
Episode three of Climate Pilgrim began with that question, sitting in the hall of the Raising Hope conference at Castel Gandolfo—the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. Scientists, theologians, politicians, and activists gathered to talk about faith and the climate crisis, but much of the conversation circled around a single uncomfortable truth: we are on track to exceed 1.5°C. The promise that small island nations fought for at Paris is slipping away.
And so the question isn’t just what comes next, but how do we live with failure?
In the main Wicked Problems feed we talk to someone with a very different response to the same issue - Laurie Laybourn on his new documentary series - Overshoot: Navigating a World Beyond 1.5°C. (That interview drop is imminent and we’ll update the link to go there directly.)
I’ve spent most of my professional life in communications, often in crisis mode. The textbook advice is always the same: tell the truth, tell it fast, tell it first, tell it all. In practice, almost nobody does. Lawyers warn against admitting liability. CFOs fret about the share price. And so, the system trains us out of candour. When that happens, magical thinking fills the void. Maybe the problem isn’t real. Maybe the numbers are exaggerated. Maybe it’ll blow over.
Saint Augustine understood that impulse sixteen centuries ago. “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet,” he wrote, confessing his own refusal to do the right thing before it was convenient. It’s a deeply human instinct. But it’s not particularly adaptive when you’re watching your neighbour drown.
If you’re from Tuvalu—a collection of low-lying coral atolls in the Pacific—rising seas aren’t a metaphor. Half the country will be flooded at high tide by 2050. By the end of the century, nearly all of it could be gone.
In 2021, Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe gave a speech to COP26 standing knee-deep in the ocean. It was meant as a warning, a plea, and a visual confession all at once: we are out of time.
This year, Tuvalu’s climate minister, Dr. Maina Talia, was in Rome, speaking at the conference. When I caught up with him, he corrected some recent headlines about “climate visas”—a scheme with Australia that many interpreted as the first step in evacuating the nation. “Migration is a definite no,” he told me. “It’s a pathway, not a relocation. Home is home. Sovereignty is non-negotiable.”
Then I asked the question that had been bothering me since I arrived:
How do we have a conversation, as neighbours, about the broken Paris Agreement promise to try to stay under 1.5°C?
He paused. “In the Pacific,” he said, “if you need anything from your neighbour, you just call out. But in climate negotiations, we forget that spirit. What happens in the global north affects the lives of those in the global south. The moral clarity must stay on the table.”
Moral clarity. It’s a phrase that cuts through the fog of diplomacy. Because behind the graphs and communiqués are human relationships—bonds that are being tested by rising water and broken promises. Tuvalu’s word for neighbour is tu/akoi, meaning “to stand and give love.” Dr. Talia made placing that concept into climate geopolitics and theology the central project of his PhD thesis.
Dr. Talia’s theology of the neighbour insists that climate change isn’t just an economic or scientific issue; it’s a spiritual one. It’s about whether we still recognise one another as neighbours when the cost of doing so becomes inconvenient.
The question “Who is my neighbour?” has been asked before.
It’s the question a clever lawyer throws at Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, trying to narrow the scope of obligation: “Okay, sure, love your neighbour as yourself—but who counts as my neighbour?” And instead of a definition, Jesus gives him a story: the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man is beaten and left for dead on the road. Two respectable citizens pass by. The third, a foreigner from a despised group, stops, binds his wounds, and pays for his recovery. “Which of these three,” Jesus asks, “was the neighbour?” The lawyer answers, “The one who showed mercy.”
Go, says Jesus, and do likewise.
It’s not a story about sentimentality. It’s about crossing boundaries—tribal, national, moral—to help the one you’d least expect to call neighbour.
Some people manage to read the same story and somehow come to confirm their priors — even if it means twisting the story out of any recognisable shape. Earlier this year, JD Vance tried to invoke a “Christian order of love” to justify cutting foreign aid and tightening borders: first family, then community, then country, then the rest of the world. It’s a tidy hierarchy of compassion. It’s seductive because it tells a lot of people exactly what they want to hear - yes it seems harsh or un-Christian but taking care of your own and leaving others to their fate is in fact just fine in Christian terms.
Pope Francis wrote back, in his own way. “Christian love,” he reminded us, “is not a concentric expansion of interest that little by little extends to others. The true order of love is discovered in the parable of the Good Samaritan—love that builds fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Which brings us back to Tuvalu. If the Gospel means anything in the age of climate collapse, it means that the neighbour we’re called to love is already drowning.
When Minister Maina speaks of tu/akoi, he’s talking about something much harder than charity. He’s talking about covenant: the recognition that our fates are bound together. That the emissions from London or Los Angeles or Beijing are already changing the lives of people we will never meet. That moral clarity is not an abstract virtue—it’s an act of bearing witness.
To look someone from Tuvalu in the eye and admit that 1.5°C is slipping away is a kind of confession. Not in a booth, hidden from view, but face to face. It’s the beginning of repentance in the original sense of the word: metanoia—a turning of the heart and mind toward a different way of living.
Maybe that’s why this episode of Climate Pilgrim felt different. Because it isn’t really about Tuvalu alone. It’s about the distance between the promises we make and the neighbours we fail to keep them to. It’s about learning to tell the truth, even when the tide is rising.
