Follow the YCCN Relay

To get firm agreement from rich countries to double the commitment of $100bn a year for climate finance.

Work with other governments and international organisations to develop a loss and damage mechanism

Push for the debts of the world’s poorest countries to be cancelled.

These are all issues of justice.

Justice lies at the heart of the discussions about the climate crisis.

The Bible paints a picture of a God who is very very keen on justice.

So many times, we read of God’s concern for the poor, the marginalised, the vulnerable, the stranger and the refugee. So many times we hear of the cause of the wronged being righted; the hungry being fed; those who wield power needing to have a special care for the weak.

The costs of climate change are not evenly spread. According to the IPCC, climate change will not only affect the different regions of the world differently, but also the different generations and genders. The poorest populations will be most affected. 70% of this population, according to the UN, are women, and a large percentage are young women.

We face lots of transnational challenges in addition to climate change: public health, inequality, social and political polarisation. Only if we build bridges of human solidarity will we survive as a species. That’s what we have learnt from Covid. The principle of social justice must be at the heart of the conversation, and how to put it there is one of the defining questions of our era – brilliantly highlighted by this Relay.

Raise your voice

Here is an issue which links directly to our faith. As people of faith, we have a responsibility to raise our voices for those who cannot.

And we also have a responsibility for our own actions and the example we set.

At its heart, we are dealing with spiritual issues. We have disrupted the ecological balance of all that God created on Earth, and we owe it to God and to each other and to all the species we share the planet with to restore the balance.

A senior academic scientist recently said:

"I used to think that the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environment problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that."

But we people of faith do know how to do that. This is the greatest physical and spiritual challenge humanity has ever faced. And we have the tools and the understanding to go right to heart of it.

Love the Lord your God. Love your neighbour. Be good stewards of the earth and all that is in it. This is the challenge we face, because we recognise in ourselves our greed, envy, laziness, indifference, and our insatiable desire for more and more stuff.

There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. We are not going to return to a life of simple hunter-gathering, back to nature and very basic consumption. That ship has sailed. We are bound up in a highly complex financial and economic web with global reach.

Religions are deeply implicated in this crisis, and they are deeply implicated in the way out of it. But we have so far mostly failed to integrate scientific and ecological findings into our preaching, teaching and living.

Religion’s got the power to appeal not just to our minds, but to our souls, and that’s where change is most needed. Conversion even.

Our actions are the true indication of our commitment. We have known about this looming crisis for decades, and for decades we have continued to assume that it is someone else’s problem.

We have collectively taken millions of plane flights and driven billions of miles using fossil fuels; we have eaten a tremendous amount of food cultivated through unsustainable and even dangerous processes; we’ve wasted unbelievable quantities of energy and water; we’ve thrown away billions of tons of non-biodegradable materials, polluting our oceans and our land; and we’ve created personal coatings of Teflon so that no responsibility has stuck to us.

Time to change

All this has to change. We can make choices which are good and not bad for the environment; we can do it visibly; we can talk to others about it, and spread the word and the message, and if enough of us do it, there is a real probability of a critical mass leading to wider behavioural change.

We saw it in the way in which driving while drunk has become more and more socially unacceptable. We’ve started to see it in many aspects of environmental awareness and care – we turn lights out more often; we sort our rubbish; we grow bee-friendly plants in our gardens or leave parts of them a little wild, and so on. And we live in a society and a world which is powerfully networked; so there is a real possibility for traction.

What messages shall we hold in our hearts? Here are some:

To consume in moderation. To think about how much is enough? How much do I need, as opposed to want, knowing how much I am conditioned to want what I do not need.

To be farsighted, to keep the far distant future in sight – the future of my children and grandchildren and their grandchildren– so that I will see the effects of my actions, or the consequences of my inactions now.

Not to lose hope. We can do this if we act now. If we act personally, locally, nationally and globally, and if we each play our part – the part we have been given, in this planetary drama which is being played out principally in the next decade.

So I salute and stand in solidarity with the young Christian climate activists and all who join them. We support you, congratulate you, pray for you and thank you for what you are doing. May God bless you who have walked this road to Reading from Cornwall, and you who will walk on from Reading to Glasgow, and may God go with you and guide your way.

Amen.

^{1. [Facts taken from this article in the Guardian, based on a PNAS study, and refer to overall biomass, not numbers of individuals or species]↩}

^{2. [From The Wildlife Trusts' Reversing the Decline of Insects]↩}