Christian Aid joins Leading Groups in Coalition to Tackle Climate Change

Christian Aid has announced that it has officially joined a climate movement coalition, which is a body set up for political action on climate change.

The Christian charity will join a host of other leading organisations that have joined the ‘Stop Climate Chaos’ campaign.

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, People and Planet, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, WWF, Network for Social Change, the Women’s Institute, Tearfund, Oxfam and CAFOD are the other top establishments that will work with Christian Aid in the new initiative.

After huge publicity brought to poverty and climate change this year by the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Summit, it has been clear to all organisations that climate change cannot be overcome without dealing also with global poverty at the same time.

Christian Aid’s international director, Paul Valentin has reported that the campaign has attracted the agency of the churches in the UK and Ireland, as it aims to create a world where human-induced climate change is capped allowing all humanity to prosper by promoting global social, environmental and economic justice.

Valentin said, “Christian Aid has a track record of working on environmental issues. Our Christian Aid Week report in 2000 (Unnatural Disasters) highlighted the relationship between disasters and climate change.

“Through our work with partners on the ground, we have been confronted with the increased vulnerability of millions of people due to climate change. Our goal is to link our programme work abroad to tackling climate change, its effects and its causes, and to make that link more explicit.”

Christian Aid was asked to join the movement on climate as the other founding members of the coalition considered the organisation to be a “critical mainstream development organisation with a proven capacity in mobilising churches, church membership and the wider public.”

The campaign, ‘Stop Climate Chaos’ will be launched on 1st September at Jubilee Gardens, near the London Eye in Central London at 9am.