WCC: Protecting children means accelerating climate solutions

Banners at the Glasgow COP26, 6 November 2021. Photo: Albin Hillert/Life on Earth

As part of a series of speakers at Erfurt University in Germany, World Council of Churches (WCC) senior programme lead for Children and Climate Frédérique Seidel delivered a lecture entitled 'Accelerating Climate Solutions: The Most Urgent Child Protection Measure of our Time.'

She spoke on how churches can best use their influence to improve children's lives, and outlined the WCC Churches' Commitments to Children programme that began in 2015.

"It was the children themselves who urged us to include climate justice as one of the three pillars of this programme," explained Seidel. "In this commitment, the programme supports churches in 120 countries with tools and know-how to accelerate behavioural change towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions for and with children and young people."

While the climate solutions empowerment part of the programme was progressing, many teenagers engaged in the WCC Churches' Commitments to Children expressed dismay over banks and pension funds continuing to finance fossil fuels, which accelerate global warming.

"Indeed, the 2025 Banking on Climate Chaos Report shows that fossil fuel financing from the world's 60 largest banks has reached USD $7.9 trillion since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, with 2024 seeing a rise in financing for fossil fuel expansion to $429 billion," said Seidel.

Seidel pointed out that the money a church or a family puts aside - whether through workplace pensions, savings, or even just in day-to-day current accounts - is busily shaping the future. "Often our money is being used to fund activities we would never dream of supporting directly: for example, carbon bombs - new drilling for fossil fuels," she said. "A carbon bomb is a fossil fuel extraction project, such as a coal mine, that can cause over a gigaton of CO2 emissions during its lifetime."

Faith plays crucial role

There are 425 carbon bombs worldwide. "We need to reassure children that adults are doing all they can to halt the life-threatening increase of CO2 emissions," said Seidel. "More and more churches are therefore asking their financial service providers for transparency on how their investments are managed."

Seidel also noted that, in the current absence of effective legal frameworks prohibiting new carbon bombs, the most powerful alternative and source of hope for children's future comes from asset owners.

"The climate crisis is a children's crisis," she said. "And it is a fossil fuel crisis."

This is why the WCC Churches' Commitments to Children promotes the "Save Children's Lives - Climate-Responsible Banking Survival Guide."

Seidel explained that, by engaging with our banks and pension funds, we can help billions of young people worldwide to lift a far too heavy burden from their shoulders. "We need to ensure that our assets are removed from investments into drilling for new fossil fuel projects and redirected into sectors accelerating climate solutions, such as renewable energies," she said. "Every church, individual, institution, and business can help to defuse carbon bombs through their banking."

Legal efforts are also needed to address the current impunity of disinformation on global warming, Seidel noted. "Your faith plays a crucial role to ensure that we meet the small window of time to halt CO2 emissions," she said.

LINK

WCC publication: Hope for Children Through Climate Justice: Legal Tools to Hold Financiers Accountable