L to R: Rabbi Yonatan Neril, Executive Director, Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development Rev. Melanie Mullen, Director of Reconciliation, Justice and Creation Care, The Episcopal Church Archbishop Serafim Kykotis, Greek Orthodox Archbishopric of Zimbabwe Rev. Dr. Lisa Graumlich, Professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences And President, American Geophysical Union (AGU) Rev. Dr. Becca Edwards, Climate Action Fellow, Texas Impact and United Methodist General Board of Church & Society
For these advocates, science and faith complement one another and motivate their passion for climate justice. Given this presence, it is unsurprising that faith is present at COP in implicit and explicit ways.
In addition to the Faith Pavilion, which hosts a lively series of panels, events, and other engagements throughout the two-week conference, there are ecumenical community coordination meetings, press conferences featuring delegates with various faith affiliations, and other opportunities for delegates to engage their spiritual selves alongside their climate advocacy side.
Rev. Dr. Lisa Graumlich, a climate scientist, ordained Deacon in the Episcopal Church, and president of the American Geophysical Union, spoke on a panel of faith leaders in a press conference Tuesday afternoon. Reframing climate change as a spiritual problem, rather than a scientific one, Rev. Dr. Graumlich said that climate change presents us with moral challenges that faith communities can speak into. Responding to climate change requires compassion, justice, stewardship, and care for creation. Religious leaders and faith communities are trusted voices who have an opportunity to inspire members toward climate stewardship because of the call to care for others.
Given their facility with these themes, Archbishop Serafim Kykkotis of the Diocese of Zimbabwe asked how we might engage the “sleeping giant,” people of faith who could be advocates for climate action if only they understood just how relevant our faith traditions to the problem.
Tuesday morning the UN Secretariat held a dialogue with the interfaith community focused on climate finance goals encompassed in the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) conversation. Delegates from a variety of faith traditions called for an environmental justice approach to administering any climate finance program.
That means money should be disbursed as grants, not loans, which further indebt developing countries to developed countries and stymie climate action. Climate action should be considered a public good and financed that way. Meaning, climate finance is not charity, but rather something that benefits all of us.
Harjeet Singh, Global Engagement Director, Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, spoke about the need for the faith-based advocacy community to start talking about hope and redefining well being. Climate adaptation is about protecting lives, he said.
A Quaker climate activist asked the group whether the climate policy community was being brave enough. She noted that the government spends trillions of dollars on weapons, but that has not made us more safe. She wondered whether people of faith should advocate against using our tax money to be used this way, when supporting climate adaptation and mitigation through climate finance would have a larger short- and long-term public benefits.
Even government leaders and negotiators for whom personal faith doesn’t appear explicitly in their work appeal to a vision of possibility that takes a page from our faith traditions.
John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy, speaks with the passion of a preacher, reminding the climate advocacy community of the progress they have made before setting a challenging charge to keep the faith and keep doing the work in the years ahead. Even though the United States will face new challenges with an administration which has historically not prioritized climate action, he encouraged us to look for the good, be encouraged by small moments of progress, and to not lose hope.
Climate action and climate finance appeal to our sense of compassion, justice, and generosity. To make a commitment to climate finance is to recognize that each of our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of our neighbors. From my perspective as part of the Christian tradition, that sounds like the gospel.
Rev. Dr. Becca Edwards is the Climate Action Fellow at Texas Impact and the United Methodist Climate and Energy Fellow at General Board of Church and Society