If You Care about trees
The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative: A Case Study of Religious Literacy
by Dr. Charles Ian McNeill
The Need for Global Environmental Activism
As the impacts of climate change intensify in plain sight on every continent, the United Nations Environment Programme released its “Emissions Gap Report 2022” just in time for the UN Climate Conference (COP 27). Completed in November 2022, it found governments still falling far short of their Paris climate goals, and that only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid an accelerating climate disaster.
Photo: crustmania, C.c. 2.0
One largely underappreciated but major cause of the global climate crisis is tropical deforestation.
The loss of tropical forests is driving the extinction of countless plants and animals, undermining the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples, and depriving us all of water, food, and jobs. It contributes to public health crises. The loss is crippling the vital rainfall generated by these forests across entire continents, decimating the productivity of the world’s agriculture.
Finally, the stunning reality: if protected and restored, forests can provide up to one-third of the solution to averting catastrophic climate change.
Multifaith Engagement
The great news is that religious leaders and faith-based communities are increasingly stepping up and speaking out about the spiritual basis in their respective faiths for action on environmental stewardship and social justice. From local religious congregations to ecumenical organizations to interfaith associations, religious leaders and faith communities are beginning to confront the economic and political forces that drive tropical deforestation.
Religious activists increasingly recognize that they have a critical contribution to make in protecting and restoring forests. This includes speaking directly to governments, companies, and global consumers; providing a moral and spiritual imperative for changing patterns of business practice and individual consumption; and engaging in political advocacy on behalf of forests, climate, and nature.
The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative
The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) is an international, multi-faith partnership that emerged to help meet the interests of religious leaders to protect the world’s forests, and to harness the transformative potential of their mobilizing power, reach, and influence.
IRI, launched at the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo in 2017, is a shared platform for the world’s religions to unite around ending deforestation and to work within and across their respective faith traditions, networks, and institutions to make rainforest protection a moral and political priority. It is also a chance to link religious leaders and faith-based organizations into ongoing efforts to protect forests to bring about the speed and scale of change that is needed.
IRI is an alliance including GreenFaith, Parliament of the World’s Religions, Religions for Peace, Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology, the World Council of Churches, the UN Environment Program (UNEP), Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), and Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN). IRI is closely affiliated with UNEP’s Faith for Earth Initiative.
Interreligious Engagement
What has been most surprising and gratifying in my work with IRI is how quickly and naturally religious leaders – at local, national and global levels – have understood and embraced the tropical forest and Indigenous peoples’ rights agendas as being aligned with their own missions. They see IRI’s concerns to be integrally related to their own concerns for the sanctity of life, human rights, and environmental justice. These are issues that most faiths have been willing to come together to address around a shared table.
While tropical deforestation is a global challenge, its drivers and the political issues needing to be addressed are both local and national in character.
In response, IRI has developed dedicated country-wide programs in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Peru. These five countries, together, contain more than 70 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests.
Senior religious leaders and Indigenous leaders plant tree to commemorate formal launch of IRI DRC, Jan 2019 — Photo: IRI
Each country’s program is hosted by a national interfaith organization, led by a national facilitator, and directed by an Advisory Council with representatives of prominent faith-based organizations, national Indigenous peoples’ groups, the United Nations, NGOs, climate scientists, and rainforest experts. Workshops are organized for religious leaders and faith communities, along with public outreach and awareness-raising, on key rainforest issues.
These programs focus on education, training, and activism. In short, they help create an interreligious literacy among religious leaders and organizations. Each IRI country program organizes faith-based action coalitions in regions of their countries where forests face the greatest threats. Most important, they work together to advocate for laws, policies, and legislation that protect forests and the rights of Indigenous peoples.
Country programs work to influence forest and Indigenous policies at local, subnational, and national levels, and influence the practices of companies invested in deforestation through logging, industrial agriculture, mining, oil production, or other extractive industries. In the process, IRI has trained thousands of religious leaders to become rainforest advocates. More than 50 local chapters have been launched in regions of highest forest loss.
As of late 2022, the five IRI country programs have created powerful faith-based movements for education, on-the-ground mobilization, and political advocacy. See animation videos to learn more about this work (Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, and Peru).
A Global Reach
One example of IRI’s work to establish a global platform for interfaith action took place at the Religions for Peace 10th World Assembly in August 2019. More than 900 senior religious leaders from 125 countries representing a constituency of more than a billion people joined together to endorse the IRI Faiths for Forests Declaration and Action Agenda. The Declaration states that the protection of tropical forests and Indigenous peoples’ rights are a moral responsibility, essential to global efforts to combat climate change, and therefore require the world’s religious leaders and faith communities to use their mobilizing power, influence, and reach to defend them.
Those assembled at the Religions for Peace assembly agreed to work together through IRI to achieve the Declaration’s goals.
Religious Literacy at Work
The IRI Colombia program provides an example of what can be accomplished through this kind of faith-based literacy and advocacy.
In 2018, IRI Colombia set out to improve both national-level and local-level development policies to make them more protective of standing forests. First, they lobbied members of Congress to get two major Articles introduced into the National Development Plan of Colombia:
One article ensures that the Colombian government recognizes the protection of tropical rainforests as a national priority. The second commits the government to develop public policies on halting deforestation, to be prepared and implemented in cooperation with all affected sectors.
Members of the 36 action coalitions in regions of Columbia who received training and capacity-building workshops through IRI earlier this year — Photo: IRI Instagram
With this national-level commitment in place, IRI Colombia mapped those regions of the country with the highest rates of deforestation and set out to launch “local chapters” of faith-based action coalitions in those areas.
Aiming to use municipal elections to further their goals, IRI Colombia brought mayoral candidates together throughout the country for public debates where they asked each candidate to sign a commitment statement that — if elected — they would actively promote rainforest protection and stand for Indigenous peoples’ rights.
After the elections, IRI Colombia came back to the newly elected mayors and negotiated to have IRI representatives serve on municipal planning councils for eight-year terms. They are now able to monitor and advise on forest and land use planning.
By the end of 2020, more than 36 local IRI chapters had been launched across the country. They are also working at the national level, regularly meeting with legislators, even presidents, always calling for enhanced action on forests and Indigenous peoples. This includes a collective call by faith leaders for the President of Colombia to increase the ambition of Colombia’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Climate Agreement.
IRI Brazil issues powerful open letter to candidates for office at national, state levels calling for protection of the Amazon and its guardians, Sept 2022 — Photo: IRI
Similar advances are being made through other IRI country programs that suggest a high potential for impact. In Brazil – where the recent change in governments has opened up new and hopeful possibilities for protecting the Amazon – the program has trained hundreds of senior religious leaders on forests and climate and is engaging in concerted moral advocacy. This includes a recent open letter to electoral candidates calling for protection of the Amazon and its guardians, which reached all eleven Presidential candidates, 1,811 candidates across the Amazon, and was covered extensively in the press. In Indonesia, provincial chapters of the program have been launched in Riau, East Kalimantan, and West Papua – all with high-level political participation. Religious teaching guides have been developed on rainforest protection for all six official religions in the country, with efforts underway to mainstream these in school curricula across the country.
The efforts in all five IRI countries are being supported by a concerted effort to produce educational materials and teaching tools in multiple languages. Written in collaboration with leading science, policy, and Indigenous peoples’ experts, these resources provide congregations the information and impetus to gain inspiration and act. They include basic “primers” on tropical forests, the linkages between tropical forests and climate change, the role of Indigenous peoples in forest protection, the connections between rainforest loss and global pandemics, and the importance of forest restoration. Resource guides and faith toolkits on rainforest protection have also been developed for eight major faith traditions, with sermons, prayers, talking points, and lesson plans.
The Critical Contribution of Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous peoples are historically the defenders and best stewards of the planet’s rainforests. A proven way to protect forests is granting Indigenous peoples’ legal title to their traditional lands. Studies show that when their land rights are legally recognized and protected, deforestation rates and greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lower.
But around the world, Indigenous peoples face serious threats as they defend their forests from extractive industries like mining, logging, oil, and agribusiness. Advocating for rainforest protection requires grappling with issues such as forest tenure and the invasion and exploitation of Indigenous lands by outside actors. Moreover, defending land rights has proven very dangerous. In 2021, 200 environmental defenders were killed protecting their lands, territories, and forests from destruction, a disproportionate number of them Indigenous people.
Indigenous leaders from throughout the Amazon gather in Macapa, Brazil to organize themselves to protect their forests — Photo: IRI
Given their cultural and spiritual connections to forests, their vast stores of traditional knowledge, and the fact that much of the world’s remaining forest lies within their ancestral lands, Indigenous peoples are obviously essential partners in any efforts to protect rainforests.
One of the most gratifying developments in IRI is the way religious leaders from all faiths and in all IRI countries have understood and embraced the need to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples. Religious leaders understand that they have the moral authority, political influence, and economic power to be truly helpful to Indigenous peoples.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), landmark legislation recently passed the National Assembly that for the first time specifically recognizes Indigenous peoples’ rights. The IRI DRC program advocated hard for adoption of this legislation. We have seen in DRC and elsewhere that, when religious leaders speak out, the government often responds.
Religious, indigenous, civil society and government leaders at launch of IRI Indonesia, January 2020 — Photo: IRI
During the launch of IRI Indonesia in early 2020, we witnessed, for the first time in the country’s history, leaders of the six formal religions in Indonesia declaring their solidarity on protecting forests and Indigenous rights to land and culture. They also added a commitment to work together through the IRI Indonesia program.
During the IRI Colombia and IRI Peru launches, prominent religious leaders explicitly acknowledged 500 years of past oppression of Indigenous peoples and extended their sincere apologies. Programs since then have focused on lobbying to secure rights and protections for Indigenous peoples. In IRI Brazil, religious and Indigenous leaders are finding powerful common purpose and a shared mission in fighting to protect forests in the largest rainforest country in the world.
This growing understanding and cooperation among religious leaders and Indigenous leaders through IRI is arguably the most transformative element of this work.
Conclusions
The rapid growth and success of the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative and a wide range of related efforts shows that faith groups, when informed, inspired, and organized through promoting ‘religious literacy,’ collectively can bring essential energy and focused, strategic interventions to longstanding global environmental problems.
Photo: IRI Instagram
It seems possible that the IRI ‘theory of change’ and methodologies could be successfully applied to other rainforest countries, beyond the current five, and then to other environmental and climate challenges such as energy, production and consumption, and the global food system.
As the new Emissions Gap Report concludes, only “an urgent system-wide transformation” can help us evade an accelerating climate disaster. It seems clear that “religious literacy” as a means to engage interfaith actors worldwide is a critical component of a ‘system-wide transformation’ and will help determine whether humankind and all living things are subjected to a seriously disruptive warming of 2 degrees Celsius or a cataclysmic warming of 3 or 4 degrees or more.
It is not likely that the world community can navigate the uncharted and treacherous waters of the climate change, biodiversity loss, and tropical deforestation crises without the concerted and collective engagement of religious leaders and faith communities. In fact, they may provide the very essential “new front’ required to turn the tide.
Header Photo: CIFOR, C.c. 2.0, BY-NC-ND