Members of All Saints Church in Wokingham, where I am the Rector, as an Advent discipline are reading the book Sleepers Wake: getting serious about climate change by Nicholas Holtam, (SPCK, 2022). A bishop in the Church of England, Holtam was its lead bishop on the environment from 2014 until 2021. The book provides daily reflections, through the pre- Christmas season, on the climate emergency from a perspective of Christian faith.
Today’s refection focuses on how the Christian call to be awake always to the truth of what’s going on requires people of faith to make every effort to know and understand the true scale of the impact of current human activity on the climate, its consequences, and how urgently and comprehensively we need to respond.
I was struck in today’s piece by his clear-eyed statement that whilst on the one hand the IPCC process especially COP 26 is a major achievement of global cooperation to tackle the problem, yet also “it is nothing like enough”. This is a way of describing the COP process which perhaps both boosters of it and detractors of it might accept?
David Hodgson 