EARTHKEEPING
NEWS
A NEWSLETTER
OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY
Volume Fourteen, Number Five
September / October 2005
British Christians Mobilize on Climate Change
Stop Climate Chaos brings traditional environmental groups such as Greenpeace together with Christian development agencies like Christian Aid. It is asking the government to cut Britain's greenhouse gas emissions, and to ensure that overseas aid money is invested in clean technologies. The group plans to expand its reach to include faiths other than Christianity.
"The big difference in Stop Climate Chaos is the united voice," the group's director, Ashok Sinha, told the BBC News website. "It brings together voices from across the development and environmental sectors to ask for definitive action on climate change." Its key demands are:
- The UK government must deliver substantial annual reductions in UK greenhouse gas emissions, meet its target of cutting CO2 emissions by 20% by 2010 and commit to an EU-wide greenhouse gas reduction target of 30% by 2020
- The UK government must make climate change a top international priority so that global warming is capped at a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
- The government must ensure that its policies on combating global poverty include investing in low-carbon technologies and clean energy and providing significantly more assistance to the developing world to adapt to climate change.
The involvement of Christian groups such as Cafod, Christian Aid and Tearfund alongside Friends of the Earth and WWF may bring a new moral dimension to debates on climate change. "As a development organisation, we can't ignore climate change," said Tearfund's advocacy director, Andy Atkins. "But in addition, as a Christian organisation, Tearfund has in its operating principles that Christians should be involved with the whole of God's creation, not just people. We have a good biblical mandate to be involved in climate change."
The idea that Christians have a duty to campaign on climate change is already well established in the US, where organisations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) lobby on Capitol Hill and in their networks of churches across the country. "We are creation care advocates," said NAE's vicepresident for governmental affairs, Richard Cizik, "and it comes straight from scripture, straight from God, who in his words said in Genesis, for example, that we are stewards of what he has created; we are to watch over and care for it. And the mere fact that evangelical Christians, who compose 40% of the Republican party's base, are beginning to say that this is an important issue, believe me, has got the attention of people in the White House."
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