the Door

When Christian Aid launched its climate change campaign back in 2007, one of the biggest challenges was convincing people that global warming was already causing severe hardship in many parts of the developing world.
 

Two and a half years on, the message that climate change is impacting the lives and livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest communities is much better understood. Christian Aid campaigners have won a notable success in ensuring that an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions was written into the Climate Change Act. Yet Ban Ki Moon’s plea that ‘We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the future of humanity’ is no exaggeration.
 

Extreme weather events are increasingly jeopardising the lives of people and animals, as we are currently seeing in the crisis caused by the ongoing drought in Kenya. And here, as elsewhere, it’s the poorest people who are suffering most from a situation that they’ve done least to cause. It almost goes without saying, therefore, that we see the agreement of a new carbon-capping climate deal at Copenhagen as a matter of extreme urgency. And the degree of support to be given to poor people and poor countries to adapt to the changing climate conditions will be a crucial part of next month’s negotiations.
 

Yet it’s important to recognise as well that tackling climate change effectively is but one step towards the eradication of poverty that we at Christian Aid are committed to achieving. Earlier this year we launched our new strategy, ‘Poverty Over’, which Bishop John described as ‘a bold new vision of a global compact to end poverty by attacking its root structural causes, and a vibrant challenge that deserves the widest possible support from the churches’.
 

In this wider vision, an effective climate deal at Copenhagen will remove one of the barriers to ending poverty. But like other challenges, such as achieving an end to tax-dodging by international business, enabling governments to fight corruption and ending extremes of inequality and discrimination, these barriers cannot be removed by one organisation alone. We need to work together – governments, businesses, development thinkers and so on – to achieve this, and the role of the churches is key to this.
 

I have argued elsewhere that it is time for the churches to recover their prophetic voice. Previous UN climate change conferences that I have attended, in Kenya and in Bali, were genuinely keen to hear the views of people of faith, but their words were softly spoken.
Speaking out loudly and clearly on the need for a deal at Copenhagen that will benefit the world’s poorest communities is an immediate and important challenge. I have also suggested that churches are too willing to go it alone. Global poverty cannot wait while we all devise our own solutions. The time has come for us to act together: to call for action at Copenhagen, to ensure that resolutions are carried out, and to tackle the whole question of poverty which is an affront to our civilisation and an affront to God.
 

Paula Clifford is Head of Theology at Christian Aid and a Licensed Lay Minister at St Margaret’s, Oxford.