Prophetic advocacy in climate policy spaces

On 30 September, Laudato Si’ Movement brought in a team of experts on prophetic advocacy in climate policy spaces to highlight how the public can address the climate crisis we are facing. 

The webinar talked about the role of Christians in responding to the cry of the Earth and being the voice of change in the environmental crisis.

Watch the full event here:

Lindlyn Moma, Advocacy Director of Laudato Si’ Movement, stated the fact that we were all living in the climate crisis and detailed the ways the ongoing crisis is affecting all of creation.

The dialogue also featured Dr. Erin Lothes, Senior Program Manager, Laudato Si Animators Program for Laudato Si’ Movement; Oscar Soria, Campaign Director at Avaaz; Tzepora Berman, Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative; and Dr. Esben Larsen, World Resources Institute (WRI) Faith & Sustainability.

Dr. Lothes complemented the presence and implementation of Laudato Si’ that gives new inspiration to the core of our faith, further stating that the LSM mission was to mobilize the Catholic community to care for our common home and achieve climate and ecological crisis through three Catholic social teachings. 

She addressed one as the plight of workers in urban environments in Pope’s letter, Industrial Revolution “Rerum Novarum”, which addressed new forms of poverty.

In the middle of the last century, the Catholic magisterial teaching took its attention to international development focusing on just and integral development that put the family first, just economies and developments. The third wave of the Catholic Social Teaching is on ecological integrity, the rights of Mother Earth.

The speakers shared how globally, we hear the very clearest insights into the urgent situation facing us all and a challenge to do something before it is too late.

We are reminded that we need to press on for climate justice. And we are called to reframe our theologies of creation, and to live by them, in renewed faithfulness to the wisdom of Scripture.

As we return to Scripture and to the central traditions of our Christian faith, we find again sources of hope that we need now more than ever: hope that will carry us through tough times ahead, hope that will inspire us to change our lives and to campaign for global change, and hope that, ultimately, God’s loving purposes will prevail. 

How and where does science come in? Oscar Soria, who served in the advisory role at Amnesty International, made it clear that we need to limit global temperature rises to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, thus keeping within reach the call from the most vulnerable to limit warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This means, for example, keeping more than two-thirds of known fossil fuels in the ground, unburned. If we keep going as we are, by burning fossil fuels and keeping emissions at current levels, temperatures are likely to rise to between 2.5 degrees Celsius and 5 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would have unprecedented and devastating impacts.