Longing Together for a New World

Written by Anthony Kamau and Kate C.

The hustle at COP27 is quite daunting. One participant has described their experience of the event as, ‘visiting the big city where everyone is in a rush to achieve whatever made them come from the village’. In many ways this is true; each day you walk past thousands of people each seemingly with a different agenda and destination. It is very easy to make the assumption that all these strangers are strolling about randomly as excited deers when they first learn how to walk; without a shared end goal. The truth of the matter is that everyone in COP27 is on a journey - all of us are longing for a better world. 

Indigenous people

The voices of the indigenous people in the Global South lament the significant encroachment into their heartlands. Some have lost vast tracts of land while others have to deal with a loss of biodiversity. In Africa alone, 65% of plant biodiversity has been lost since 1970 and there is no sign that this will slow down soon. Some native communities in the Pacific who have a greater dependency on the natural environment for food, shelter and spirituality recognize that the earth is taxed over capacity and this is affecting every aspect of their life. In South America the forest cover is being lost at a faster rate than it can be recovered. Most of these people groups trace their problems to the rapid expansion of the industrialised nations into the new world. 

The resounding question that we all need to wrestle with is how are we positioning ourselves to partner with all these indigenous people to bring about holistic transformation?

The Sahel people

In Africa’s Sahel region more than 10 million people are facing starvation. This is owing to 5 failed rainy seasons that have been occasioned by human activity that is affecting seasons. This is really a harsh and disproportionate effect given that people in this region contribute the least to global warming and have the lowest emissions. One of our friends, Adam Walton- had a passionate conversation with a young man from South Africa who was keen on the loss and damage funding facility for the Global South community. He noted that the loss and damage facility is not only for those in the Global South but for the whole world since Africa is seen as the global food basket and as long as it is secure the whole world is. This hunger is not on paper or ‘electronic’ as we would like  to assume, it is affecting real people and disrupting real lives in the communities we serve. How might we see ourselves playing a role in lessening the burden for these people without necessarily being mandated?

Youth

Martina Fleckenstein from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) talking about intergenerational justice noted that the number of young people attending COP has more than doubled in the last 10 years and they are using their power to raise their voices to shape policy. While it is a fact that youth have come in large numbers to COP27, the truth is they still feel marginalised from conversation yet they recognize that if indeed the future is theirs, they will bear the greatest brunt of climate change. One youth leader said to me today that COP is structured in such a way that there is no integration that allows youth participation in these conversations. In her words, “we have been invited into the party but we are not allowed to dance.” How might the senior people in the society open the doors for the youth to gain acceptance and credibility to decision makers?

Conclusion

Just as the butterflies that God created are diverse and rich, we all have a different sense of the better world we are looking for. There are those that are looking to reduce green gas emissions into the atmosphere, while others want to maintain earth's rich biodiversity. Some would like to see the end of plastics while others with all their might are working towards food security for the future world. There are many examples we could give but we will circle back to this conclusion, that while all these goals might look like they differ principally, they all aspire for what the Apostle Peter exclaims in 2 Peter 3:13, “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.” A farmer put it this way in one of the sessions on sustainability today, “If we are to realise a systemic change, we need to recognize that the critical challenges we face require significant partnerships”. The indigenous people of Peru will need to sit down with the bureaucrats in Europe and see themselves as partners on a journey towards a new world. In the same way you and I will need this reckoning.   

Joyfully Listening,
Anthony and Kate

Gender Agenda - Aluta Continua

Written by Allen Drew, Dorren Irungu, Lydia Perris

Today was Gender Day at COP27. The day was filled with panels and side sessions focused on how the climate crisis is impacting, and is impacted by, women and girls. Our team visited three panel discussions in which we were presented with two core realities: 

First, women and girls are disproportionately and negatively impacted by the climate crisis. Women globally earn 50% less than men, and are much more likely to feel the impacts when extreme weather strains livelihoods. For every $10 of climate relief aid given out, women receive $1. When drought strikes, women and girls are forced to walk farther and farther to find water - and in this space of abject desperation and vulnerability are exposed to increasing sexual violence. 

Yet while women and girls tend to suffer more from the growing challenges of our changing world, empowering them can be one of our most powerful solutions. When given resources, women use them to strengthen their children and their communities at a rate ten times that of men. Women make up 60-80% of low income farmers and are at the very heart of food production, even though they lack many of the tools and resources of men. They also carry Indigenous knowledge about sustainable care of the land. Jay Collin wrote in his book, Draw Down, that gender equality is the 6th most impactful of all solutions when it comes to reducing global emissions.

And so the message was presented with strength and clarity: Empowering women drives the economy forward. Empowering women heals the land. Empowering women strengthens communities. Women are not merely victims of the climate crisis - they are also key agents of change.

Our panels ended with a hopeful message - a rallying cry for gender equality as a core element of our climate work. Yet this was not the whole story.

The reality is that the struggle continues for women and girls, Indigenous people, the poor, and all who have been marginalized and pressed down by those in power and unjust systems. Women are not at the table nearly as much as men. This COP, despite being the “African COP,” has raised many financial and other barriers to African leaders and civil society attending. Our own Doreen and Anthony’s Kenya has many delegates present, but no pavilion. And Indigenous voices continue to be marginalized, even though their climate solutions are some of our world’s most impactful.

We would like to invite you to look at yourself, your home, your church, and your community. If you are someone who is in power, who might you invite to your table to share their wisdom with you? If you are marginalized, be reminded that Jesus came to earth so that you might have a voice at the table - what table might you, encouraged by him, seek a place at? As you ponder these questions, we affirm the discomfort of stepping into them. Aluta continua - the struggle continues. And it is through this struggle that the Kingdom of God breaks into the world.

PRAYERS:

1. For the week 2 team: for our spiritual eyes to be opened to what God is leading us into, and for deep fellowship and friendship. For the week 1 team: refreshment and energy, time and space to process and glean deeper insights into this week, passion and enthusiasm for their work back home. 

2. Women across the world who are (not mutually exclusively): 

• Victims and survivors: of sexual abuse, domestic violence, loss and damage caused by climate change, lack of opportunities, systemic injustices, of droughts. For protection, community, healing and confidence in speaking out and standing up. 

• Leaders: especially young women, to know their influence, to steward it well and use their position for God’s glory, for fresh anointing and stirring of what God is calling them to! 

3. Unity and solidarity, especially between men and women, to create a just and fair future that honors, protects and builds up women. 

4. For somehow the disconnect between ‘high level’ negotiations and local, lived experiences to be bridged, and for those experiences to be at the fore of national and international policies, especially around gender equality.

Our Climate Purpose Must Be Clear

by Lowell Bliss

Lowell is the co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) that will be bringing emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies to COP27 in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, Nov 6-19, 2022. This blog post first appeared at creationcaremissions.org on January 27, 2020. It is posted here as an example of: 1) how we can make our the purpose clear in our climate messaging; and 2) how CCOPers can use this space at COP27 for their own blogging.

I accepted it as a given when the Kansas Leadership Center listed as one of its five underlying principles about leadership: Your purpose must be clear. “People have to care,” they say. “You have to care enough to do something different. Without a clear sense of purpose, nothing is going to change" (KLC Handbook, 9). Shortly thereafter, when I encountered Simon Sinek’s TedTalk, I immediately understood what he meant when he said that such people or organizations like Apple, Martin Luther King or the Wright Brothers all “start with Why.” Sinek said, “By ‘why,’ I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? . . . The inspired leaders and the inspired organizations—regardless of their size, regardless of their industry—all think, act and communicate from the inside out.”

That’s one of the reasons why I have found our climate targets to be so problematic. When I have stood before an audience with a copy of The Paris Climate Agreement in my hand, and declared “Our purpose is “to prevent an average global temperature warming of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels,” I feel even my own consciousness scrunching up to say, “Huh?” UN Secretary-General António Guterres took a giant leap forward in clarifying our climate purpose when in September of 2019 he wrote every single head-of-state and challenged them to pursue “Climate Neutrality by 2050.” Wow, just four words. That’s even shorter than John F. Kennedy’s challenge before Congress in 1961: the US “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Nonetheless, anyone in Kennedy’s audience could go outside and look at the moon. They might know of its distance there and back (477,710 miles.) The nature of the challenge is crystal clear. In September of 1961, at a packed football stadium at Rice University, Kennedy was additionally able to drill down into the inspirational “Why?”:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

“Carbon Neutrality by 2050” might be a clearer purpose than temperature preventions, but that doesn’t make it clear. Do you know for certain what “climate neutrality” means? And why is the year 2050 significant? And, equally important, what in the statement, as a rallying cry, should make you care? I appreciate Secretary-General Guterres’s challenge, and I do adopt it as my own, but I also recognize that it may take more than just its four words to make our purpose clear. And so, I undertook an exercise:

Our Climate Purpose Must Be Clear:
“Carbon Neutrality by 2050”
But what does that mean?

Before I took up this explanatory challenge, I gave myself another one. I borrowed from a popular urban legend from the 1980s that goes like this: the CEO of Sony one day walked into a meeting of his engineers. He pulled out a small block of wood and placed it dramatically on the table among them. “Design for me,” he told them, “a tape player of superior sound quality that is no larger than this block of wood.” The result was the first Sony Walkman. For me, I was determined to fit everything I wanted to say on a single half sheet of paper, the size of what we used to use for church bulletin inserts. If you read it out loud, it clocks in at a two-and-a-half minute “elevator speech,” which should be okay so long as you and your listener are both travelling up to the top floor. After choosing a suitably evocative photo, here’s what I came up with for my half-pager:

Simply, that the nations of the world would live
in balance with how God has created
our common home.

When God created his oceans, vegetation, and rocks, he gave them capacity to absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at an astounding rate of 9.5-11Gt of CO2 per year. That’s drawing out of the sky the equivalent weight of one billion African elephants every year. We call these carbon sinks.

We want to live in balance with how God created the world. We want to honor what our Creator God had in mind when he designed natural processes like his carbon sinks. What carbon neutrality simply means is that the total amount of CO2 that our human activities (like the burning of fossil fuels) puts up into the atmosphere would not exceed at least 9.5Gt in any given year, the amount that God designed his carbon sinks to handle. “Net zero” is another term for carbon neutrality:

9.5Gt emitted (minus) 9.5Gt sunk = 0
neutrality, balance, honoring God’s mechanisms

In 2019, the nations of the world emitted, not 9.5Gt of CO2, but rather 36.81Gt. It was another “carbon positive” year and that meant a further thickening of our atmosphere with these gas molecules which re-radiate heat back to Earth instead of letting it escape into space. We were once again out of balance, and the accumulated effect of extra heat energy resulted in many devastating disasters in 2019, such as bush fires, floods, and droughts.

But what’s so special about the year 2050? If we can decrease CO2 emissions by 7.6 percent each year until a carbon neutral year of 2050, then the atmosphere will not be as thick with greenhouse gases as it could be. It will still be different than what our lifetimes, indeed our civilization, has ever known, and indeed many good people will suffer, but at least not as badly as what we would if average global temperatures were to rise over “1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels.”

So you see, “carbon neutrality by 2050” is the same thing as talking about the old 1.5ºC target, but in a way that is easier to understand and more directly under our control (“7.6% decrease a year, folks!”). Plus, with a bit more reflection, “carbon neutrality by 2050” ties us to some of our greatest values: we want to honor God by living in balance with how he created our common home.