Christians around the world are being encouraged to take legal action against polluters and those who finance them.
In a new climate justice handbook, the World Council of Churches sets out practical ways faith organisations can help protect young people and future generations from the climate crisis.
Drawing on Christian teachings on stewardship and justice, it presents strategic litigation as a tool to “create hope and hold responsible parties accountable”.
Many faith leaders have spoken up about the climate crisis, including Pope Francis, who published a powerful 2015 encyclical and has continued to exhort Catholics to action.
But the World Council of Churches, which represents a wide range of denominations around the world, said it had become “increasingly clear that advocacy alone is insufficient” as CO2 emissions continued to rise, driven mainly by the “relentless expansion” of fossil fuel industries.
“This situation compels us to recognise that there is no contradiction between utilising legal frameworks and embodying Christian values,” it says. “In fact, our faith calls us to speak truth to power and to seize every available legal measure to protect our planet and its inhabitants.”
The handbook notes that climate litigation has grown dramatically in recent years. Such lawsuits can succeed directly in changing corporate and state behaviour, but they also shift public discourse and catalyse broader changes in policy. Lawsuits are increasingly targeting organisations that fund and invest in fossil fuels, including public and commercial banks, pension funds and credit agencies.
“A targeted legal intervention that increases the costs of doing business for fossil fuel firms could foreseeably have significant system level knock-on effects, for example, making renewable energy technologies cheaper than fossil fuels,” says the handbook.
“A focus on financial actors offers a rare opportunity for systemic impact that could be unrealisable through the targeting of individual fossil fuel firms.”
There is precedent for faith-based legal interventions on climate. A lawsuit brought by residents of an Indonesian island threatened by rising sea levels against the Swiss cement producer Holcim, for example, is supported by the NGO Swiss Church Aid (HEKS/EPER).
“We hope to see a proliferation of legal action across the world on moral grounds,” said Frederique Seidel, the senior programme lead on children and climate at the World Council of Churches.
Work on future lawsuits is under way. Susan Lea Smith, a professor emeritus at Willamette University in Oregon and an experienced environmental litigator, has been working with the council to develop strategic litigation in the US. She is exploring a potential damages case against big greenhouse gas emitters for smoke damages associated with recent wildfires in Oregon.
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Seidel said companies targeted by faith organisations faced serious reputational risks. But she hoped the threat of litigation pricks the conscience of some people to make changes before any legal shots were actually fired.
The handbook was not intended to be political, said Seidel, noting that the council represented a wide spectrum of conservative and liberal churches covering nearly 600 million people in more than 110 countries.
But she recognised that litigation came with a risk of backlash. “We take these concerns very seriously. We are essentially leaving it to our constituency to choose the means and the mechanisms that are most viable and comfortable for them in their own political and social context.”
The handbook also outlines a number of possible non-litigious actions including questioning financial organisations about their investments or reporting concerns about companies to regulators or bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Churches are also encouraged to keep divesting from fossil fuels.
In a foreword, Vanessa Nakate, the Ugandan climate justice activist and a born-again Evangelical Christian, said the handbook pushed back against the notion of exploiting resources for individual gain and encouraged a more “eco-centric approach”. “This is a call for the church to rise against injustices,” she wrote.
