The WCC Central Committee has Issued a Statement on the Imperative for Effective Response to the Climate Emergency
The WCC Committee meeting of 15-18 June 2022 has issued a Climate Emergency Statement…
“Decades of scientific research have validated the reality of the accelerating climate emergency that now confronts us as an actual imminent catastrophe. Decades of advocacy by the World Council of Churches together with many faith and civil society partners have articulated the need for action, for a just transition to a sustainable future, and for accountability to the most vulnerable poorer communities and Indigenous Peoples, reflecting the historic responsibility of the most developed industrialized nations.
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) make it clear: to stay within the safer limit of 1.5°C global warming and to avoid much more serious consequences for life on earth, the global community has no more time to waste in reversing the trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions. Our Christian faith impels us to act – not only to speak – to safeguard God’s Creation, to protect the most vulnerable, and to promote justice. The global community is now faced with an existential need to move and act immediately and effectively for the sake of the whole of Creation, of which all human beings are a part. It is a moral and spiritual imperative.
The final statement of the recently concluded Fifth Halki Summit – co-organized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Sophia University Institute on 8-11 June 2022 – observed that that “we are at a decisive turning point for the future of the human family” in which the churches are called to play an essential role in developing a shared ecological ethos, in overcoming the culture of waste, and in “reinforcing connections between ourselves and all of God’s creation, between our faith and our action, between our theology and our spirituality, between what we say and what we do, between science and religion, between our beliefs and every discipline, between our sacramental communion and our social consciousness, between our generation and the generations to come”.
The global metanoia required to confront this challenge must, first and foremost, entail an urgent phase-out of fossil fuel extraction and use, and a just transition to renewable energy sources that protects the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized communities and takes into account gender justice. However, in stark contrast to this need, the world is currently on track to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas by 2030 than is consistent with limiting the rise in global temperature to below 1.5°C, and this negative trajectory is being accelerated as a consequence of the war in Ukraine.