From the Arctic to the Amazon: Religion in the Extremes

From November 10-21, international representatives will gather in Belém, Brazil--in the heart of the Amazon rainforest--for the COP30 climate summit.

Billed as a critical event to assess progress on the Paris Agreement, evaluate national climate plans and discuss the Amazon's sustainability, the event not only highlights the region's biodiversity and challenges but reminds us that the hot spots of climate change are often far from familiar institutions and global centers.

In the Arctic, melting ice reshapes both landscapes and livelihoods, raising questions of survival and meaning. On low-lying islands in the Pacific, rising seas threaten ancestral graves and sacred sites, forcing communities to reimagine their relationship with place, identity and faith. In the Amazon, where Catholic priests bless river communities and Indigenousvoices advocate resilience, religion is emerging as a frontline voice against the bleeding edges of climate change. And when extreme weather events — from heat waves to hurricanes — leave devastation in their wake, faith groups are on the front lines of responding and rebuilding.

Religion is shaped by these changes, even as it shapes the way individuals and communities react. It is woven into the ways people understand loss, cultivate resilience, cope or hold onto hope at the planet’s margins.

For journalists, covering religion in these contexts means widening the lens. The story isn’t only about policy debates or institutional statements; it’s about how belief is lived at the edges: in prayers for safe hunting grounds, rituals for vanishing coastlines and ceremonies that reinterpret tradition in the face of upheaval.

By telling these stories with nuance, journalists can illuminate how climate change is not only an environmental crisis but a spiritual one — reshaping the meaning of place, community and religion itself.

As COP30 approaches, this edition of ReligionLink offers into religion and climate change in the extremes.

How then shall we live, when the world is on fire?

Climate change is happening.

I am not a scientist. Nor do I pretend to be. But drawing on information taken from natural sources — like ice cores, rocks, and tree rings — recorded by satellites, and processed with the aid of the most advanced computer processors the world has ever known, NASA experts report “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and that “[h]uman activity is the principal cause.” 

From global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, glacial retreat to sea levels rising, the evidence of a warming planet abounds. While Earth’s climate has fluctuated throughout history, the current season of warming is happening at a rate not seen in 10 millennia — 10,000 years.

Many of the undergraduate students in courses introducing them to religious traditions — Islam, Christianity or otherwise — have no reservations about climate change and its disastrous effects on the environment and the most vulnerable in human society. In my classrooms, there is a palpable fear about the planet’s future. 

It is little wonder, then, that students often ask how religious actors interpret their sacred texts and confessions or how they, in turn, address climate change or engage with the environment. 

What they discover can often be disappointing — if not infuriating.

Lessons Learned Reporting on Religion and Climate Change

“The road,” wrote Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “is made by walking.”    

Often adopted as a metaphor for pilgrimage, Sarah Moring, a climate activist living in Manchester, England, said she walked with this quote every day as she joined the Young Christian Climate Network (YCCN) — an advocacy community of young Christians in the U.K. — on its relay before the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), in September 2021.  

Stretching over 750 miles and cutting through Cardiff, London, and Oxford, YCCN participants joined a “crusade for climate justice” by walking the route between the end of the G7 meeting in Cornwall on June 13 and COP26’s opening ceremony on October 31 that year.  

When I covered the pilgrimage for Christianity Today, I had not done much reporting on people like Moring. But over the last two years, I have reported from India and Israel, Lisbon, and London, where people of faith are coming together to respond to climate change and demand action based on their religious beliefs.  

It was with a desire to see more widespread coverage of faith actors advocating for environmental justice that I teamed up with abby mohaupt to write a “Reporting Guide on Religion and Climate Change” for ReligionLink, a nonpartisan, monthly newsletter with source guides and story ideas for journalists reporting on religion.  

Developing the guide, I learned how diverse faith groups view climate change and are coming together to address it.