#cofeenvironment

Giles Goddard, Vicar of St John’s, Waterloo, in central London, writes about the Pilgrimage to Paris, a year on after it set off from London

On a drizzly Friday in November 2015, a group of pilgrims set off from St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square to walk to Paris. We walked down Whitehall, across Westminster Bridge and through South London into the countryside of Surrey. We came from across the country, the oldest over 70 and the youngest under 20 years old. We were united in our concern to make sure that the voice of faith was heard at the forthcoming COP 21 climate change talks in Paris.  

Sent on our way by Bishop Nicholas Holtam, the C of E’s lead Bishop on the environment, we were apprehensive but full of hope.  

We slept the first night on the floor of a church hall in Banstead, Surrey.  The news when we woke was sombre - terrorist attacks in Paris had killed over a hundred people. Suddenly we were walking not just as a visual and physical statement about climate change, but in solidarity with all who had been affected by or killed in terrorist attacks across the world.  

There was doubt about whether we would be permitted to cross the Channel. But as we walked on through rain and wind towards the coast, after a couple of days the news came through that we would be able to board the ferry in Newhaven and carry on across the north of France to Paris.

I left the Pilgrimage in Newhaven – parish duties called – so I missed the journey through France. But I was told by those who walked the whole way how moving the pilgrimage was: how they were welcomed warmly into people’s homes, and given huge encouragement in their journey by people who were touched and inspired by the witness of the pilgrims.

And then, in Paris, they met other pilgrims from all over Europe and beyond. Someone who had come from Canada by bicycle (and ship).  Others who had walked with the visionary Yeb Sano, who had inspired pilgrimages around the world. And others who had simply and quietly made the journey because they cared.

A petition, signed by more than 1.8 million people, was presented to the Executive Secretary of the COP 21 talks, Christiana Figueres. She was very clear that the witness of faith groups in the run-up to Paris had made a material difference to the success of the talks. “I want to thank you,” she said, “for every single step.” 

The Paris Climate Agreement was made more possible because faith groups all over the world lifted their voices and said – “This matters. The talks must succeed.”  On 4th November this year, the Agreement came into force. It’s a remarkable achievement. As I write this, more than 100 countries have ratified the deal, including the UK.

But many say that it does not go far enough. The commitment of countries to reducing their carbon emissions may be insufficient. That’s why the next set of talks – COP 22, in Marrakech, due to finish today, is so crucial.  The challenge to all the countries is how to put flesh on the bones of the Paris Agreement.

The voice of faith leaders was there again. A statement signed by over 170 eminent faith leaders was due to be presented to the President during the talks.  

All round the world, people and congregations are saying that they want to help make a better world for them and for their children.

St Mary’s Church in Lowdham has one of the largest rural church yards in Nottinghamshire. Janice Yelland-Sutcliffe, a member of the church, writes about a renovation and environmental project in the churchyard and adjoining field and how this has brought together people from across the community.

“Two or three years ago, I began to realise that there was a need in our church to connect more with the community in line with what was being encouraged by the Diocese and Deanery.  In addition to this, St Mary’s churchyard being one of the largest rural churchyards in Nottinghamshire had received feedback that the top churchyard was neglected – I think in part because it is so big and difficult to manage.

“At the same time I was considering what was the future for me and how I could support the church and community.  I left work in 2010 to care full time for my daughter and in 2012 finally completed a MSc in Education for Sustainability. By 2014 I needed to do something to get out of the house. Sustainability and the environment are my passion and being involved with the church and on the Parochial Church Council (PCC), I thought with my experience and expertise I could help get a grip on the churchyard.

“We had an open day and a couple of discussion forums and there was a lot of interest in the history of the church, and the feeling that if the church cared for the churchyard, then the community felt cared for. We have a ‘front of house’ churchyard, a back churchyard, a field and a beck and a little coppice. There was a big enough space to do things, so we began to think about educational opportunities as well.

“We set to on the work with the sense of really wanting to honour what God has given us and what we are stewards of. The vicar was fantastic, the PCC was behind it, the faculty officer was supportive and we started clearing.  

“The back part of the top church yard has 1,000 graves, sitting cheek by jowl, and cherry tree saplings had sprung up all across it. We began taking out the best part of 1,000 cherry tree saplings. The trees had pushed graves over and we had a rabbit warren that had come up between two lots of graves. You couldn’t walk, it was highly uneven, it was difficult to get around. There were families in the village who could not get to their family graves. We were losing biodiversity because it was getting overwhelmed with brambles and nettles. It was trying to find that balance between ecological biodiversity and human access and maintenance.  

“We have been planting hedgerows and replacing hedges. We have had employees from HMP Lowdham, the local prison, come and help us. Some of the prisoners helped with making garden furniture and people taking part in the community pay back scheme came along to do work. We have had help from the scouts, people from the village and members of the congregation. People have come looking for family graves and as a result have contacted us asking us when they can come and help.

“In the field we planted an orchard of more than 40 trees and we have also planted a 100 metre length World War I Heritage Hedge within which we have planted a willow for each of the men in the village who fought or died fighting in World War I. We are creating stories, as we are planting.

“In the ‘front of house’ churchyard, we are starting to get a lot more of the wildflowers coming through and we are going to create a nature area and wildlife areas. We would like to see forest school style activities and opportunities for outdoor worship. We are just at that point, after two years of work, of being able to put in place a proper maintenance and development plan for the future. It has been hard work but it has been fun. I think I’ve learned more about my village in the last two years than in the last 20 years of living here.”

Janice Yelland-Sutcliffe

Church of England churchyards cover an area equivalent to a small national park, acting as a huge nature reserve for England. David Shreeve, the Church of England’s national environment adviser, writes about the significance of CofE churchyards for the environment and conservation in advance of Cherishing Churchyards Week

“They may be taken for granted and their benefits often vastly undervalued, but churchyards are wonderful.

There are species growing in churchyards that grow nowhere else.  We say that added together, the 10,000 CofE churchyards make up the area of a small national park, but a national park can be acre upon acre covered in a single species of heath or heather.  Churchyards are much more biodiverse – they add up to a huge national nature reserve.  

There is more than just the biodiversity that makes churchyards special, as the recent Nature of God’s Acre project in Chichester Diocese has shown.  These are unique places which are neither gardens, fields nor parks - they are owned by the Church, but belong to the community. They are places where generations past have found their rest and where plants and animals increasingly pushed out from their surroundings through development and changes in agricultural practice have also found a haven.

The project has just published an excellent book featuring almost 40 churchyards to help better understand the relationship with nature in churchyards today.  Many people reported having a spiritual feeling, being thoughtful and contemplative when they saw such wildlife. As the Bishop of Chichester, Martin Warner, says: “The churchyards of Sussex are places where we invest some of our most precious possessions.”

There are almost 560 churchyards or green spaces in the Diocese of London many providing the only green lung within the parish. St Lawrence Whitchurch, Little Stanmore and All Saints Isleworth both have six species of bat active in them. The Firecrest Regulus ignicapilla  which vies with the Goldcrest for the title of the UK's smallest bird has also been positively identified from its calls in All Saints (there are only up to about nine breeding pairs known in London) whilst the very rare Mile End jumping spider Macaroeris nidicolens had its only 5th UK sighting in St Mary’s, Leyton. The Nuthatch Sitta europaea has been observed in St Dunstan, Stepney, and a recent survey of the diocese found 28 species of lichen never before recorded.

St Peter’s, Cradley in the Worcester Diocese, has a mammoth task underway involving their eight acres of churchyard.  For years brambles had hidden local history.  With them cleared, First World War graves and a Boer War memorial have been discovered and room found for bee hives, bug hotels and bird boxes.  The Rev Katryn Leclézio says the work on the churchyard has attracted people into the church.    

The Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust is discussing with Ely Diocese and others a possible churchyard and burial ground campaign for Cambridgeshire.

Not every wildlife trust has a churchyard award scheme, but many do. Dorset Wildlife Trust invited the Bishop of Salisbury, the CofE’s lead bishop for the Environment and chair of its Environment Working Group to present the awards at its annual Living Churchyards ceremony last year.

With so many churchyards, the Church is responsible for a huge number of trees.  Two workshops in London and Liverpool later this year are aimed at clergy, churchwardens, tree wardens, tree organisations and other interested parties to spread good practice and plan a programme to bring churches and communities together to ensure our churchyards remain of value for future generations.    

Churchyards like churches need care and maintenance, but they bring huge benefits and deserve all the cherishing we can give them.”

Cherishing Churchyards Week, promoted by the charity Caring for God’s Acre starts on Saturday and lasts until Sunday June 12.

www.caringforgodsacre.org.uk

Photo by Elizabeth Perry, damage in the Solomon Islands from Cyclone Pam

Elizabeth Perry, of the Anglican Alliance, was among a group of around 50 people who took part in the Pilgrimage2Paris in November last year in advance of the United Nations climate change talks.

”Getting caught up in a cyclone does perhaps concentrate the mind. I was in the Solomon Islands when Cyclone Pam ripped its way through last March. For me, it just meant experiencing violent wind and rain, disrupted travel, getting stranded overnight by rising water, having to wade through a river and (literally) walk the plank / fallen coconut palm because a bridge had been washed away. But for the people of the region it was another disaster from which they are still recovering.

Two days later I interviewed Tagolyn Kabekabe, the Anglican Alliance’s facilitator in the Pacific, about how climate change is affecting the region. She told me how they’re seeing changing rainfall patterns, more intense storms, rising sea levels and the salination of soil. It’s all having a huge impact – people lose crops, their water is affected and already people are having to migrate. Tagolyn told me how the Anglican Church is helping people adapt to climate change, for example introducing salt tolerant plants and planting mangroves to protect coastlines, but there’s only so much they can do - and they know it. “The biggest challenge for me”, Tagolyn said, “is when they (local people) ask the question, ‘are they going to help us control the sea coming up, and the unusual rainfall and all that?’” By they she means the people most responsible for climate change… the industrialized world… us. “[The] bottom line is we need help, and we need it now, and any pressure you can apply on politicians to respond to the urgency of the situation is appreciated”.

And so, in November I set out on the Pilgrimage 2 Paris, to “pray with my feet” and call on the leaders of the nations gathering for the UN climate talks to take bold and decisive action. I wanted to walk in solidarity with the people I know at the sharp end of climate change, not only in the Solomon Islands, but also in Vanuatu, Bangladesh, the Caribbean and Zambia.

So as I set out on my 200-mile journey, I already had a sense of being connected – but I am still completely blown away by how that awareness burgeoned during our pilgrimage.

First, of course, there were my fellow pilgrims – each with a story, each with a reason for taking part, each with a passion for our beautiful, fragile common home. Then there were all the people we met along the way: the school children who publicly led us in prayers of commitment, the local people, clergy and bishops who walked with us a while, and the many churches who provided hospitality and welcome all the way from London to Paris. All these people were part of the Pilgrimage 2 Paris too. What started as a stream at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 13 steadily grew as we added them to our number and felt like a river when we arrived in Paris two weeks later.

But the sense of being part of something much bigger goes beyond even this. Prayer was at the heart of our pilgrimage, and it feels as if we were caught up in something there too. I have no idea how prayer works and I am not for a moment suggesting that my, or even our, prayers were responsible for anything that happened – but, for me, there were connections between some of the positive outcomes of the summit* and specific things I, and others, had been praying for. It feels like something was going on. Perhaps it’s that our prayers were part of the movement of the Spirit… that we were caught up in the Spirit’s breeze.

This experience of connectedness, of being part of something bigger, is the thing I treasure most from the pilgrimage. I always thought I would enjoy the pilgrimage; I never expected to enjoy it so much, to miss it so much, to be so blessed by it.

And now the journey continues. We have taken a huge step forward with the Paris climate deal, but the real outcome will depend on the steps we all (governments, cities, local communities, individuals) take next. We do not journey alone.

These were my thoughts on the outcome of the COP21 climate summit in Paris (written at the time):

It's not perfect... but it is a massive achievement - a breakthrough and, potentially, a turning point.

The more ambitious (and unexpected) temperature target clearly signals the end of the fossil fuel era and a transition to a low carbon energy future. It also shows that people at the sharp end of climate change were heard this time and that their voices made a difference in convicting all nations to take action (as this was one of my particular prayers, I am glad). 


We now, at last, have a positive momentum. The nations came together and took action together, as a whole. The negotiations didn't break down into the usual factions of self interest; we saw new groupings emerge (especially the High Ambition Coalition) which have broken through the traditional rich/poor divide.

We have a five yearly review built in so action can be measured against current science and action scaled up.

So, for me, lots to be thankful for. We could have been looking at a post Copenhagen scenario, but we aren't. 
Yes, there are lots of problems, especially the gap between the stated ambition and the currently promised actions, but it feels to me like this is the beginning of a new era, where the world as a whole has finally "got it".

The launch of Eco Church at St Paul’s Cathedral today is a milestone in the Church’s recovery of caring for God’s creation as a core element in its mission and ministry. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams unveils and blesses the new scheme before a full church, it marks the end of one chapter and the start of a new and exciting one. We are at a key point, as the Paris COP21 negotiations showed, where action by governments and business needs to be accompanied by ordinary people transitioning towards a less polluting and consumptive relationship with the earth we depend on.

Churches have a key role to play in this. There is increasing recognition from politicians and scientists that environmental sustainability is a moral and spiritual issue, not just a technical one, and that faith groups are vital in finding the values we need for a liveable future. That is why I’m so excited about Eco Church. Designed and run by environmental charity A Rocha UK, Eco Church is supported by a range of key partners including the Church of England, the Methodist Church, Christian Aid and Tearfund. It is a tangible, achievable way of helping thousands of churches make progress towards becoming communities that practise what we preach in terms of God’s compassion for all that he has made, human and non human alike.

Eco Church is new, not simply a revamp of the old Eco-Congregation award, yet it builds on and learns from years of experience and work that shaped its predecessor. I was Moderator of the parent group of Eco-Congregation when it transitioned to being managed by A Rocha UK, and it had been clear for some time that, good as it was, Eco-Congregation had passed its sell-by date. It appeared to be a big ask for busy churches, and many began it enthusiastically only to run into the sand long before applying for an award. Despite this, and thanks to the hard work of volunteers, many Anglican parishes benefited from Eco-Congregation. I have visited and spoken at churches in rural, suburban and inner-city areas, from across the spectrum of traditions, who have discovered that caring for creation is not an extra burden, but a means of renewing worship, deepening faith, and discovering missional links in the community.

Eco Church is an online scheme for a digital age, accessible and user-friendly. Its key elements include that it is free to use (although donations are welcomed and will be needed), and that it is a points-based system with clear, accessible milestones. Churches begin by registering and completing a simple yet thorough online survey of their current environmental practice. This covers five key areas of church life: Worship and teaching, Management of church buildings, Management of church land, Community and global engagement, and Lifestyle. As progress is made in each area, churches collect points towards first Bronze, then Silver and Gold Eco Church Awards. The first two are self-assessed whilst the Gold Award requires an independent assessment. Churches receive a certificate to mark their Award and can purchase eco-friendly Award plaques made from recycled pews. The survey is supported by excellent resource materials, available as attractively-produced PDF downloads, and there are links to the Church of England’s own Shrinking the Footprint resources.

The central idea is not to add lots of burdensome new activities, but to change how we do the things we do already, whether it’s how we use energy, purchase materials, teach children, or think about worship. So, why not look at http://ecochurch.arocha.org.uk, log in and start the process? I have been waiting many years for a resource as good as this and am excited to commend it to parishes and Dioceses.

- Dave Bookless is an Anglican Priest, licensed to St John’s Southall in London Diocese. He is also Director of Theology for A Rocha International and a member of the Church of England’s Environment Working Group.

To watch the video of the launch with Rowan Williams of Eco Church at St Paul’s Cathedral see http://www.stpaulsinstitute.org.uk/videos/2016/jan/26/eco-church-launch-with-rowan-williams

UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, said the COP21 talks in Paris were the largest and most complex he has ever been involved in. COP21 was a huge exercise - to gather representatives of 196 countries made for a conference the size of which most of us have and never will experience. And following the acts of terrorism in Paris just two weeks earlier, it was all the more important to show the world that we can act together in the care of our common home.

The global agreement reached on Saturday is far more ambitious than many of us had thought it might be in the weeks running up to the conference. Not only have we got the 2-degree aspiration – limiting the rise in global temperatures to ‘well below’ 2 degrees above the pre-industrial average – but we’ve also got an ‘endeavour to limit’ them even further to 1.5 degrees. Combined with the five-yearly reviews of each country’s emissions cuts, and the provisions for climate finance, this has turned out to be a promising deal going some way to preventing the most catastrophic consequences for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Quite a few people noted on the first day of the conference, when the political leaders were making inspiring speeches, that they used the language of NGOs. This was good news: politicians are responsive, they felt the tipping of the political argument. The really important thing is to hold them to account for delivering what has been agreed about a low carbon future.

Faith has made a difference to the conference. There has been an astonishing ecumenical convergence about the care of the environment and climate change. The ecumenical service in Notre Dame in the first week of the conference was uplifting. It was introduced by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, an Orthodox priest preached, and a female Lutheran Archbishop read the Gospel, all without comment. There were three choirs: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. We prayed together for the environment and for COP21, which was so pressing and so important as to make relatively insignificant the other differences between us.

The same point makes possible a working relationship with people of other faiths. Their involvement in the renewal of the Lambeth declaration on climate change in June was striking. It also led to most of the faith groups present in the UK issuing their own statements about climate change - this was very welcome. In Paris a group of 20 faith leaders presented to President Hollande petitions signed by more than 1.8 million people from faith communities around the world.

The pilgrims who walked from London and from various parts of the world, gave credibility to the faith communities present on the edge of the summit. I think their witness was what moved Christine Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, to tears when she met them on the Saturday before the conference began. One of the memorable moments was of her dancing with the Archbishop of Cape Town. The pilgrims told extraordinary stories about the journeys that they had made. It will have changed them forever, and I hope it will change the communities to which they return.

The outcome of COP21 is only in part for the governments of the world. Certainly they have a tough task ahead of them. But so do we, as individuals and communities, trying to respond to the reality of the need for repentance and amendment of life if we are to reduce our carbon footprint. It is an invigorating challenge on which hangs the health and wellbeing of our grandchildren. When the Prime Minister said that our grandchildren will ask 'What did we do at this particular moment in our history?', it won't be good enough to say that we questioned the science and worried about the economics. We need to work out how to use transitional technology in order to find a low carbon future.

It's not just an individual commitment – there are things we can do together as the Church as well. In each church community we can be working towards becoming an Eco-Church, reducing our heating and electricity bills, finding sources of renewable energy, and being more efficient about the resources we use. These are quite simple, but actually quite demanding things we can do to try and shrink our carbon footprint. Very practically, our Shrinking the Footprint initiative is doing excellent work in encouraging our churches to look at ways to do that.

COP21 has been hard won and now needs to be hard-wired. This isn’t an optional extra for us as Christians and as Anglicans. Caring for creation has been one of the Anglican Communion’s marks of mission since the 1980s: it’s who we are as a Church and who we are as Christians.

On Sunday 13 December, a new era dawned – After Paris.

After Paris. The era of a universal climate change agreement. The era in which we know the collective will of the governments of the world is to keep the global temperature increase ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius and even to seek to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

The Paris Agreement was an extraordinary diplomatic achievement. Implementing it will be an equally extraordinary and yet more unprecedented feat. Itrequires all of us to recognise the new era and to play our part.

Governments need to sign and ratify the Paris Agreement. They must increase the ambition of their Nationally Determined Contributions so these pledges are up to the collective task of turning round and dramatically reducing emissions. They must put in a place a stronger policy architecture to drive the transition to a low carbon economy at the urgent pace the Paris Agreement demands.

Companies must review their long-term expectations of how their businesses will develop, work up business plans consistent with a low carbon economy and then go further still and think ahead to a zero carbon economy. We need a tidal wave of innovation.

Investors must get real about integrating climate change into their investment practice.

Individuals must speed their personal journeys to low carbon lives and hold governments, companies and investors to account.

The new era is not being imposed on non-state actors. One of the reasons for the success in Paris was that non-state actors were fully involved with the Paris process. Companies and investors in their hundreds signalled that they wanted a deal. People in their hundreds of thousands marched in the capitals of the world. The Church of England’s Pilgrimage2Paris even walked the 200 miles from London to Paris carrying our own hopes for a deal.

What practically does this new era mean for investors?

It means that investors need urgently and deeply to consider the risks and opportunities that the Paris Agreement brings. Almost all portfolios have been built around the risk and return assumptions of the old era.Before Paris.

The assumptions were that climate change would impact investment in the future, but not now; that a change of course needed action from governments, butthat political leaders would not take it; that a 2 degrees world was desirable, but anything like it was impossible.

There is still a huge amount of uncertainty for investors. More than before, in fact. How fast will policy move? How fast will innovation proceed? How fast will consumer behaviour change?

The best risk control method for investors remains not to wait and see, but to work harder than ever to make the low carbon future happen.

To enhance engagement with policy makers about reducing uncertainty and getting sound policy frameworks in place.

To strengthen engagement with companies to ensure their business plans are consistent with limiting warming to well below 2 degrees.

To focus harder on investment in low carbon opportunities and innovation.

At the Church Commissioners we are already active in all of these ways. The ‘Aiming for A’ engagement initiative in which we are involved, and which successfully filed shareholder resolutions at the BP and Shell AGMs earlier this year, is the flagship investor initiative for assertive stewardship of companies whose businesses are highly impacted by climate change. We are filing more resolutions in the mining sector for next year’s AGM and are looking for even clearer support from the investor community.

But even we were not expecting the ambition of the Paris Agreement. We will be working  to ensure our portfolio is well positioned in the light of it and will revisit the ambition of our asks of policy makers and companies to continue to be at the forefront of responsible institutional investment.

Today the new era begins at investors’ desks. The era of After Paris.

I’ve discovered that it takes a lot of strength to walk 200 miles from London to Paris, especially in November. We each travelled the road as a group, and as an individual. Arriving in Paris was spectacular, the journey made it so. If the road was easy, the benefits would have been less. Walking all day every day for two weeks provided plenty of opportunity to reflect on the commitment of those 200 miles. Every step I took was, and continues to be, motivated by those who have no certainty about their future in a world affected by climate change.

In many ways, the pilgrimage becomes a microcosm for the challenge ahead of us as a world in relation to climate change. Every day had its challenges, most of them were the same – getting to our destination for that night, having the energy to get there, making sure we are going in the right direction. It requires taking one step, then another. Then another. The only way to get from London to Paris on foot was to take each step as it came.

There were three things that gave us the energy to reach our destination each day: Hospitality, Play, and Singing.

The hospitality we received from each place we visited was overwhelming. We were welcomed and loved – giving fresh insight to our familial relationship in God. The encouragement of joining in a meal or a treat with host families and churches along the way and sharing the journey with them was powerful.

Play became a source of evening laughter and inspiration. A night in a village hall turned the game bananagrams into a craft session. What began as spelling ‘Pilgrimage2Paris’, flourished into using all the letters to spell words we had come to associate with our pilgrimage. The journey that we had taken in ourselves and as a group was laid on the table in the letters. 

Singing. One moment in particular stands out. Walking through the woods on the approach to Paris, it was pouring down with rain. As we sang, there was a real sense in which a unity had been achieved through the common sharing of songs. From To be a Pilgrim to Laudato Si, the songs that had become ours in some way became enough to keep smiles on the faces and a passion for reaching Paris as this visible witness to our commitment to the cause of climate justice.

The physical journey has now finished, but the challenge to us continues: Witnessing to the world that the Church cares about climate change, shaping our own lives by living more sustainably and supporting change in any way they can. This pilgrimage showed me that each person, in this world, can make a difference.

This week, the world has the chance to create fair, ambitious and legally binding global agreement that protects our environment, achieved in no small part by each of us taking the first step, then the next, towards a low carbon future.