Q&A: The NWT bishop at the COP30 climate conference

Bishop Jon Hansen, of the NWT’s Mackenzie-Fort Smith diocese, has joined a Catholic humanitarian aid agency’s delegation to the 2025 United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

Hansen and Bishop Martin Laliberté of Trois-Rivières are two of an eight-person delegation sent to the COP30 conference by Development and Peace – Caritas Canada.

More: Inuit urge countries to advance climate action at COP30

COP – the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – is the planet’s biggest climate gathering.

This one has featured large-scale protests, including some led by Indigenous groups, calling for more urgent action.

Hansen says climate change is “no longer just a scientific debate or about dollars and cents – it is really coming down to a moral, just and ethical issue, and so we feel like our voice is welcomed here and is being heard at the highest levels.”

Cabin Radio reached him in Belém to hear more about his role at COP30 and what he has been hearing.

This interview was recorded on November 14, 2025. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ollie Williams: Tell us how you came to be a part of COP30.

Bishop Jon Hansen: Development and Peace – Caritas Canada has been an organization for about 50 years, working with partners in the Global South, and they decided they would put together a delegation to come to Belém for the COP30 meetings. I was asked to be one of two bishops on the delegation.

At the same time, you’re representing the “global far north,” which has a lot of interests of its own at a conference like COP. What are your objectives there?

Our objectives as a delegation are to be observers and participants in the COP meetings, just to see what’s happening, to meet with and network with our partners here in Brazil, and to amplify the messages of our partners, who see themselves as being the ones on the hook down here in the Global South as far as the ongoing climate change and ecological destruction that’s taking place.

My role, as I see it, is to connect the voice of the south with some of the same issues we’re facing in northern Canada, and to let our southern partners know that they’re not alone and we want to be a part of a solution together.

What kinds of connection are you making between the issues you’re talking about that in the Global South and the issues we all know about up here in the Northwest Territories?

Some of the major issues I’ve been listening to these last few days are vulnerable people who come from very small communities like we’re used to seeing in the North, and they’re saying that their interactions with large business interests are sometimes filled with beautiful promises, and ended up just being nightmares.

One story I was told: a dam was being prepared to be built in an area of Brazil. The very first piece of infrastructure that was built was a brothel for the men, and women were lured to the area, very remote area, promised good paying jobs, and then found themselves kind-of as sex slaves in this brothel.

We also want to let them know that our land is also being ravaged by climate change and ecological disaster – the forest fires that we’ve been through, the evacuations, and also things like the drought that has disrupted our waterways. Communities are paying so much for necessities that the average person just can’t survive in the North any more.

So we’re making these links, we’re making connections, and then we’re just being a part of the process where our voices are going to be heard. The key message, what I’m hearing at this year’s COP, is that people are tired of just the talk. They really want to begin to see concrete solutions.

The broader political environment is one in which a lot of nations appear to have turned away from caring as much as they did even a few years ago about some of these climate targets we’re talking about. What is the atmosphere like to you on the ground there, in terms of what you’re hearing, what you’re seeing?

We have seen some protests. Some of them even turned a little violent, some police officers were hurt. We do see peaceful protests as well.

What you’re saying is true, that some governments have sort-of slowed down, and people, of course, are getting cynical about what possibilities can come out of meetings like these. However, I was just at a meeting yesterday where the bishops of the Global South presented a very important document where they outline the plight of the people from their area, and they’re calling with a strong voice for the Global North. They’re not just pointing fingers at what has been done, but they’re saying it’s time to join us in the solution.

As they spoke, they presented their document to a representative from the UN, and the response to the UN was for people of faith to keep the pressure on, because this is no longer just a scientific debate or about dollars and cents. It is really coming down to a moral, just and ethical issue, and so we feel like our voice is welcomed here and is being heard at the highest levels.

How do you see the role of religion in climate evolving?

I’ll speak from my own experience as a Catholic bishop. Pope Francis, our late Pope Francis, wrote two very important environmental documents: one in 2015, in which he raised asked people to become aware and awake to the issue that is facing our common home, then eight years later, he wrote a second document, saying it’s no longer enough to just become aware, but we have to become responsible. We really have to look at what we’re doing as a country, as a nation, but also at our own individual lives. How can we as individuals start to see ourselves not being so entitled to the things we take for granted, but to truly examine our lifestyles and see how we can move into a new century? Recognizing that things just can’t go on the way they have been.

And so our new pope, Pope Leo, has taken up that mantle. He’s affirmed those documents and what Pope Francis was trying to say, and he’s taking it forward. And I think Catholics and people of faith have seen that and are encouraged that our message will continue and we’ll just keep going down that road.

The one thing that I took away at the COP meetings was that it might look a little dismal from the surface – because we’re not meeting those goals – but we’ve been told that if we weren’t doing what we’re doing, things would be far worse than they are today. So we just have to be hopeful and keep the pressure on.