Kia ora – us again!
You probably don’t remember us, but we’re the trio of social service professionals and animal rights activists trying to open up the conversation within the social service sector about the imminent danger climate change poses to tamariki and whānau: the connection between social work’s code of ethics and animal sentience – and how social work should be paying more attention to this existential threat!
It is now becoming quite apparent that large portions of the world’s population will suffer imminent starvation, droughts, negative health impacts, job losses, water shortages, land displacement, cultural loss and death because of our collective inaction on the climate crisis. The associated suffering will fall “disproportionately upon people living in poverty, marginalised ethnic communities, migrants and women and girls”. This sounds like a fairly good representation of the people social workers work with every day.
We are talking in the region of billions of human lives and the lives of trillions of other sentient beings – a number so large that it is in danger of causing more inaction due to its sheer enormity. However, we need to heed the warnings and act sooner rather than later.
There are many out there who are asking for help, none more so than our own tamariki and mokopuna. The children of Aotearoa, in conjunction with UNICEF Aotearoa have started a petition asking for “a formal commitment from our Government to implement child-centred and climate resilient social systems and infrastructure”.
This is not dissimilar to the Australian Senator David Pocock’s private members bill (Climate Change Amendment – Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity Bill 2023) asking for “decision-makers to consider the health and wellbeing of children in Australia when making significant decisions”.
In essence this petition is asking the New Zealand Government to implement structures, policies and legislation that consider the tsunami of issues coming down the pipeline in relation to how climate change affects the most vulnerable in our community. It is a very proactive stance from a sector that has more to lose than us oldies.
It seems clear to us that Aotearoa’s tamariki are asking for help: a cohort who fall squarely within the remit of social services and social work. Should social work not turn its full attention to this clear, present and growing threat?
It’s not as if we do not know the main culprits of greenhouse gas emission, both in Aotearoa (see Figure 1 below) and globally; the culprits are staring us straight in the face.
Yet social work (and social services more generally) does very little to combat climate change and even less in confronting the real offenders.
If the sector wants to honour to the voices of tamariki in this country, we have listed a few suggestions to get us going – baby steps but steps nonetheless:
- Call the issue out. If we do not speak of it, if we do not mention the words, it does not go away – it still exists. But without speaking of it, it doesn’t stay front and centre. Climate change is coming whether we decide to be ostriches or not.
- Bring in as many Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) as possible to facilitate discussions with social service professionals so that the effects of climate change on those we serve can be understood and quantified. At the moment, it just seems that it is some far away issue that will never arrive, but it is here, it isn’t going away, and it is only getting worse by the day. Some key issues that could be addressed by differing SME’s include:
- What does soil erosion mean to a population’s health?
- What do heat waves mean for a population’s health?
- What does land loss mean to a family’s ability to get ahead and what are the effects on cultural, mental, emotional and physical wellbeing?
- What is the projected number of ‘early’ deaths because of climate change and how do this affect a community?
- What Government policy levers need to be pulled to alleviate these issues?
- Who are the players that cause climate change and what is the best way to advocate against them – playing the long game is what we are talking about here.
- Work with our educators and academia in general to make Climate Change, Green Social Work Practice, Radical Social Work Practice, Structural Social Work Practice on a par with, if not more prominent than, individual face to face social work practice.
- We are not saying kill the latter, what we are saying is that face to face social work, while very much needed, is not going to alleviate this threat which is no less than humanities existential threat.
- Through education, this may in turn – year after year – produce social workers who will think differently about this issue – not discounting face to face social work but knowing that the other macro components are very much real imperatives – a burning issue now!
To cut a long story short – we have experts saying that climate change is a stark threat to Earth’s future. Now our own children are asking for our help; when is the profession going to take it seriously and start working to advocate against the drivers of this catastrophic threat?
Image Credit: Riccardo Maria Mantero
Ngā Mihi
Kerstin Hagena
Alina Hagena
Luis Arevalo
2 replies on “When the most vulnerable ask, we must act”
Kia ora, koutou. Wonderful post to remind us of the importance of this issue – which can become forgotten from time to time as we deal with everything else e.g., cost of living, effects of new govt. policy etc. IMO it’s fairly clear that we are heading towards at least a 2 degree increase in global temperatures. As a SW educator, I’m aware that this issue is at the forefront of younger people’s minds – so we definitely need to ensure that this is reflected within the SW curriculum.
Nga mihi.
Thanks for your comments Andrew. We would love to see this reflected in the curriculum more prominently. The emotional, mental and physical distress, coupled with the cultural erosion that climate change creates almost screams for it to have its own semester!
Take care, Nga mihi