Climate concerns: How faith can help bridge divisions

As the United Nations June Climate Meetings continue in Bonn, Jamie Williams, Islamic Relief’s Senior Policy Advisor on poverty reduction, reflects on what divides and what heals.

Many people think that negotiations about adaptation should be straightforward: these are the climate risks, this is what is needed to reduce them, and here are the means of doing it.

But adaptation is a matter of deep disagreement, particularly when it comes to money. Lower income countries – called ‘developing countries’ by the UN – argue that rich, industrialised nations are responsible for wrecking the climate. They demand that these countries now provide the adequate financial support for the adaptation that they have promised.

Yet higher income countries (termed by the UN convention as ‘developed countries’) use the negotiations to resist their commitments, especially when it comes to helping the world’s poorest adapt to a climate crisis they did not cause.

Mitigation efforts – aimed at reducing emissions – receive the lion’s share of funding because they offer clear, measurable returns on investment. Adaptation is often local, unprofitable, and hard to quantify.

Lower income nations call for predictable, grant-based funding, not vague promises or debt-generating loans. Higher income countries respond that the private sector will fill the gap, so they don’t have to – even though private money won’t reach the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Unlike emissions reductions, adaptation is context specific and difficult to define. We struggle to be clear what ‘successful adaptation’ really looks like. This has complicated efforts to track funding and hold parties accountable. Many of the blockages we are seeing here around the UN Global Goal on Adaptation stem from this very uncertainty.

All of this plays out against a backdrop of power imbalance. Least Developed Countries and Small Island States have the most to lose, yet they have the least influence in negotiations.

Their calls for urgent support are drowned out by the strategic interests of larger economies, including those which are wealthy but are not accountable under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to pay for lower income countries.  

These divides must be bridged and for those of us most concerned with fairness and vulnerability, it means finding space for mediation and common ground. This is where faith can – and must – play a role.

Finding common ground through faith

In a time of rapid and unpredictable change, we need tools that help us understand interconnected systems. Complexity science – which studies systems with many interacting parts – can help us design adaptation strategies that reflect the tangled realities of climate impacts.

Within complexity, faith offers the values and moral frameworks that shape how we see the world, how we care for each other, and how we act, including the values of responsibility, humility, care, and justice.

Faith communities also bring something uniquely powerful to the climate space: moral authority, deep-rooted trust, and global reach. They are present where governments fail. They mobilise action where politics stall. Most importantly, they speak to the human soul – something no scientific model or financial mechanism can do.

Overcoming disconnection

As we navigate these coming years of urgent, transformative adaptation, we need both rigour and spirit. Science and systems thinking must be part of the path which must also follow compassion, justice, and purpose.

This will result in the kind of transformational adaptation that responds not just to rising temperatures, but to the deeper crisis of disconnection from each other and from creation.

Climate adaptation, at its heart, is about how we can survive in the face of climate breakdown as faith guides us to – with nature, with each other, and with future generations.

Islamic Relief works in over 25 countries to help people adapt to the climate realities they face. Please support our climate and wider work by donating today.