Faith & Climate Change (4)

What follows is my input to the faith leader's panel session at the Faith and Climate Change conference in answer to the question: 'How does your faith reconcile the issue of climate change and economic development?'

Climate change is first and foremost a justice issue. The developed world bears a historical responsibility for the climate crisis as we have grown rich by polluting without facing the costs of doing so. Our growth has effectively been subsidised by the damage that we have done to the rest of the world. Those who are already suffering most from global warming are those who have done the least to cause it, and who have the least resources to do anything about it. As the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environment Outlook suggests, unprecedented levels of economic growth have pushed the planet to the point of destitution. That is essentially how a Christian Aid report setting out a theological approach to climate change and development begins and I agree with their analysis.

As Chair of Faiths in London’s Economy, I was involved, earlier in the year, in compiling a ‘Shared faiths response to the credit crunch’ in which we stated that “Western economies have been inflated through greed, with their economic make-up being based on self-centred acquisition” and this has led to “economies predicated on unlimited growth which have then caused harm to the environment.”

It may be, we suggested, that we are now at a point in time when, because the free market has been shown to be unable to provide its own banks without these being propped up by Government funds, new structures for society can be produced. Recession, the credit crunch and the ecological crisis may be combining to bring about profound shifts in the global economy; a ‘third way’ or ‘middle path’ between nationalisation and capitalism, based on agreed standards of ethics, environmental and social responsibility and a much broader understanding of wealth and value. Such a restructuring of the global economy in terms of a broader understanding of wealth would see new kinds of jobs (i.e. in renewable energies, creative industries, and community empowerment) forming its foundation.

Such a restructuring could also provide space for addressing the ecological crisis. Ecology cannot be divorced from economics. For example, the ecological costs of extraction and replacement of the world’s natural resources have in the past been excluded from company accounts but their inclusion would provide a very different picture of the effects of the global economy on the environment. If justice is to be done in addressing climate change, the West must repay its carbon debt by accepting a fair share of the burden of global cuts in greenhouse gases, in addition to domestic cuts.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent lecture for the Christian environmental charity Operation Noah, warned against looking for a single solution to the complex environmental challenges which face us. “Instead of a desperate search to find the one great idea that will save us from ecological disaster, we are being invited to a transformation of individual and social goals that will bring us closer to the reality of interdependent life in a variegated world”.

The future, if it is not to be an apocalyptic scenario, will need to be relational. The theologian Karl Barth wrote of a human being in the community of the church as someone who is “united in society as an individual with the whole Church, related … to God, but in God to others.” The Christian Aid report that I mentioned earlier ends with a challenge to the Church, which is also a challenge to all (including the worlds of business and economics); to “work together, not in isolated joint events, but in a continuing and deepening commitment to combat climate change as it affects the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Such action is required at the personal and local, as well as at the national and international, levels. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his recent lecture, “When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the surest foundations for change at the national and international level” and our small actions mark a break with destructive patterns of consumption and waste helping “to make us more aware of the diversity of life around us.”

How does my faith reconcile the issue of climate change and economic development? In terms of seeking to address injustice, develop relationships, and share in local and global transformational and transitional actions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paolo Nutini - High Hopes.