In September 2019, in the light of the climate and loss of biodiversity crises, Christ Church launched an “Eco -Group”, with the aim of examining our own responsibilities in this area. By working towards the A Rocha Eco-Church awards, we are looking at all aspects of church life, from the way we use our buildings and grounds to the worship and teaching and our individual lifestyles. Through regular input into Church meeting and items in our monthly magazine, Comment, these issues are kept in the foreground of our thinking. The most recent four articles in Comment can be found below.
JUNE 2023 - We have now been awarded the A Rocha Bronze Award - Certificate here
Item from February 2025
Climate news continues to come thick and fast with the devastating fires in California the latest disaster to hit the headlines. While the Santa Ana winds and wild fires are a natural part of the ecology of California, the strength of the hurricane force winds and the time of year – the usual season for wild fires is late summer and autumn – is unprecedented and can be attributed to human induced climate change. Fires of this type and magnitude have never been experienced before during California’s winter.
While a few powerful people continue to describe climate change as a “scam”, it is significant that the churches are stepping up to argue for the changes that we all need to make if we are to protect creation and the planet for future generations. Out of control climate change would threaten our very existence. Specifically, most denominations have set ambitious targets for reducing their own carbon emissions. The URC, for instance, has resolved to “act urgently to reduce carbon emissions across the whole of church life in order to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2030.” The Church of England and the Methodist Church have also set targets of net zero emissions by 2030, and the Baptist Church by 2035.
A Rocha, the organisation which runs the Eco-Church programme, has recently updated its survey, a tool which helps us to see the steps that we should consider taking. It covers everything from reducing our energy use, phasing out the use of fossil fuels, how we use our grounds, the food we eat and the products we buy to the place of creation care in our worship and teaching, how we engage with the wider community or environmental campaigns, the way we travel and live our lives individually. It is clear that caring for creation – nature, the environment and the climate – whether in church life or as individuals, is not for a few enthusiasts, but something we all need to commit to. 2030 does not feel very far away and, if we at Christ Church are to reach net zero by then, we have work to do!
Stop Press On 17th January the Met Office published figures showing that global CO2 emissions in 2024 did not come down but were the highest on record.
Item from December 2024
It is difficult to know where to begin this month, with climate events and news coming thick and fast.
COP 29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, while over-running by a couple of days, has just concluded. One of the main aims was to produce an agreement on finance to be committed by the richer countries of the world to the poorest to help them develop their own green economies and adapt to the climate change caused by our emissions. Some agreement was finally achieved, but the sums involved are far from what is considered adequate by developing countries, who have branded the deal a “betrayal”. The conference has been difficult, with controversies over, for instance, the significant participation by oil and gas producing companies and attempts by Saudi Arabia and other fossil fuel producing countries to even pull back from last year’s modest resolution to “transition away from fossil fuels.”
Just to explain, COP stands for “Conference of the Parties” and "Parties" refers to the countries that have ratified a treaty called the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). That document was signed back in 1992 by almost 200 countries and is generally known as the Paris agreement. Representatives of these countries meet every year to negotiate the best approaches to tackling the root causes of climate change. But, even when modest commitments are agreed, they have not always been achieved.
With extreme and damaging weather events becoming increasingly common, the flash floods in Spain and severe hurricanes in the Southern United States being just two of the latest examples, it becomes ever more urgent that the world tackles the issue with speed and determination. 2024 is set to become the warmest on record while planet-heating emissions are not going down but actually increasing to their highest level ever this year. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping the temperature increase down to the 1.5 degrees target. Some experts think we are already too late for this. The election of a climate change denier as the next president of the US - who calls the climate crisis “a big hoax” and has announced his intention to leave the Paris agreement - is scarcely encouraging.
A piece of news I have found sad is discovering the words that have been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary and those that have replaced them. Of course, the job of a dictionary is not to dictate but to reflect the reality of language used today, but I wonder what it says about the experience of today’s children that words that have gone include acorn, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar and newt. The words taking their places include blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.
We do pray that God will lead the leaders of nations and industries at this critical time, and all of us to do whatever we can, in our small ways, to care for the natural world of which we are a part.
Item from October 2024
“The central geopolitical challenge of our age”?
On 17th September an important speech about the impact of human induced climate change was made by a Cabinet minister. The interesting thing is that this was not a minister with a special responsibility for climate change, but David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary.
Mr Lammy described the climate and nature emergency as “the most profound and universal source of global disorder” and “the central geopolitical challenge of our age.” There has been a tendency for climate and nature policy to be seen as separate from other issues, but, he argued, the threats to global stability and prosperity are so great that climate policy has to be integral to foreign policy.
“Let’s take migration.” he said. “We are already seeing that climate change is uprooting communities across the world. And by 2050, the World Bank’s worst-case estimate is that climate change could drive 200 million people to leave their homes.” It will take global cooperation to deal with the implications of this. “Or we could take health. The World Health Organisation says climate change is now the biggest threat to human health.”
We are well aware of the inequalities between those countries who have contributed most to global warming and those who have contributed least but suffer some of the worst effects. “Time and time and again,” Mr Lammy said, “it is the most vulnerable who bear the brunt of this crisis.” The BBC’s Climate Editor, Justin Rowlatt, in the same week, demonstrated this starkly in a report from Somalia, which has recently suffered from both drought and flooding, exacerbating the problems of conflict and poverty already faced by the country. While no single weather event can be attributed precisely to climate change, their increasing frequency and severity is exactly what climate scientists have been predicting. Somalia, he pointed out, has produced the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions since the 1950s as the USA produces in just 3 days. An astonishing statistic.
Organisations such as Christian Aid have campaigned for some time on the issue of climate justice. This means richer nations accepting the part they have played in causing the climate emergency and their responsibility to support poorer nations, not only in dealing with its effects but also with their own developments towards sustainable energy. This is in our interests as well as theirs. Mr Lammy argued “There will be no global stability without climate stability. And there will be no climate stability without a more equal partnership between the Global North and the Global South.”
With the potential of climate change to affect migration, conflict and economies world-wide, it is encouraging to see it being considered, not as a side issue, but in the mainstream of our foreign policy.
Item from September 2024
Many of us have spent time marvelling at the spectacle that was the Paris Olympic Games and the phenomenal achievements of so many athletes and we applaud the ideals of the Olympic movement. But what is the environmental impact of such a huge event?
- The International Olympic Committee has had impressive aims for the Paris games, intending to “set new sustainability standards for global sporting events. Reducing the environmental impact while maximising social and economic benefit”. Organisers have been focused on reducing emissions, planning to cut the footprint by 50 per cent compared to the London 2012 and Rio 2016 average and aligning with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
So what measures have they taken to achieve this? Too often in previous games expensive venues have been specially built and not used to their full potential again, but a key aspect of Paris 2024’s sustainability and carbon reduction strategy has been to use existing or temporary venues, which account for 95 per cent of the total venues. Only 2 completely new venues were built, the Aquatics Centre and an arena for badminton and rhythmic gymnastics. In both of these the seats were made from 100% recycled plastic! Other measures have included doubling the amount of plant-based food for spectators, to halve the carbon footprint of meals, and embracing the idea of a circular economy, reducing, renting and re-using materials wherever possible. In the building of the Olympic village 94 per cent of materials were recovered from deconstruction.
Ironically, it was fairly extreme weather, which Olympic organisers have attributed to climate change, which provided some of the biggest challenges of the first few days. Severe rainfall in the first couple of days led to the postponement of events as outflows into the Seine led to the water quality being unsafe for swimming. This was quickly followed by heatwave temperatures. The Paris 2024 organisers had hoped their innovative self-cooling Olympic Village apartments would make air conditioning redundant, but in these conditions, athletes had to be offered the opportunity to rent portable air-conditioning units.
So there are clearly challenges to really reducing the environmental impact of such huge sporting events. The Paris games will still produce 1.5 million tonnes of carbon - roughly comparable to Fiji's entire annual emissions. Around half of that comes from international travel by competitors and spectators.
Meanwhile we note that the world temperature reached the hottest levels ever measured on Monday 22nd July, beating the record that was set just one day before, according to provisional data published by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The director of Copernicus, Carlo Buontempo, has said that the world is now in “truly uncharted territory”, adding that he expects global temperature records to continue being broken in future months and years as the climate continues to warm.