By Susie Weldon

A powerful new influence has emerged for climate action and it’s one that may cause some environmentalists to choke on their morning muesli with surprise – religion.

Next Monday nine of the world’s major faiths – Baha’ism, Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism and Sikhism – will gather at a major conference in Windsor to announce long-term action plans for the planet.

The entire event has been organised by a tiny charity based between Bristol and Bath. The Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) is a secular body that helps religions develop environmental programmes based on their core teachings and beliefs.

Before you ask just what religion has to do with the environment, consider the following. The faiths reach out to 85% of the world’s population, own 7-8% of the habitable land on the planet and 5% of commercial forests.

They also have huge financial investments and they are involved in half of all schools worldwide.

So what they do with their assets and their influence matters. It matters a lot.

Indeed, the United Nations regards the faiths’ announcements on the environment next week as so significant that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is taking time out of an incredibly busy schedule, pre-Copenhagen, to make a keynote address.

That’s partly because it seems the UN has finally accepted that Copenhagen is unlikely to produce a serious deal on climate change.

From having talked constantly of “sealing the deal” at Copenhagen next month, the UN is now urgently trying to dampen down expectation and talking of Copenhagen being a stage on a longer route to a global agreement, according to a recent revealing interview in the New York Times.

All this has put the spotlight firmly on the religious announcements next week – unofficially, the UN is saying they’re the only good news on the environment likely to emerge this year.

But Windsor is not about putting a good spin on what will be a very unpleasant media firestorm, if Copenhagen proves as disappointing as many fear it will.

Indeed Ban Ki-moon says what the religions are doing “could motivate the biggest civil society movement the world has ever seen”.

For the first time, many of the action plans drawn up by the faiths – which are intended to influence the attitudes and behaviour of the faithful for generations to come – explicitly state that how we treat the planet, climate change itself even, is a moral issue.

And this, if you think about it, has massive implications. It means that not only are the faiths obliged to speak out on environmental issues, they’re also obliged to make sure their own practices are consistent with their green beliefs.

That means judging everything they do – the way they construct their buildings, the energy they use, the investments they make, the lessons they teach on the world – through an eco-friendly lens.

Religious leaders and environmentalists don’t normally make easy bedfellows but even the most hardened green activist has to admit that the faiths are a powerful force, particularly on issues of morality.

It was faith-based investors who, back in the 1970s and 1980s, led the campaigns to boycott investment in apartheid South Africa. Two centuries earlier, the Quakers led the campaign to boycott businesses connected to the slave trade.

Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence almost certainly had its roots in the religious principle of ‘Ahimsa’ (doing no harm) he learned from his Jain neighbours; and from it developed his own famous principle of Satyagraha (truth force) later on in his life.

Martin Luther King’s involvement in the black civil rights movement was closely related to his Protestant faith, and nine years ago faith groups played a major part the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which propelled the issue of poor countries enslaved by huge debt repayments to rich countries to the top of the political agenda.

That’s partly why they’re calling next week’s three-day gathering in Windsor a ‘Celebration of Faiths and the Environment’; because, despite the gloom, there’s a lot to be positive about.

And many of the plans are seriously impressive. In Tanzania, for example, church leaders intend to plant 8.5million trees to address serious deforestation problems. In China, all Daoist temples are to be solar powered.

Sikh gurdwaras, which feed 30 million people a day, are moving to ecologically sustainable fuel; the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs intend to develop faith-based eco-labelling; leading Muslim cities are to become green cities; several faiths are looking at how to make pilgrimage (still the world’s biggest travel events) more sustainable; and the Church of England is to cut its carbon footprint by 42% by 2020 and a staggering 80% by 2050.

Even the relatively simple move of greening religious buildings – something all the faiths are doing to a greater or lesser extent – has huge implications, says ARC boss Martin Palmer.

“In the UK, there are probably more than 100,000 religious-owned buildings in the UK – not just churches and mosque but halls and centres, schools and so on,” he says.

“So when the faiths say ‘we will cut our energy use’, that is more significant than when, say, WWF UK say it, when they’ve got just five or six buildings.”

Imagine all religious-owned or run buildings in the UK switching to renewable energy, linking up with nearby farms to source mainly organic or at least locally-produced food and using only fair-trade product, and all religious-held investments going to environment-friendly companies – that’s the kind of world next week’s announcements are looking forward to.

And we haven’t even begun to look at the longer-term outcome all the huge environmental education programmes the faiths are planning, both formally, in their schools, and informally among their congregations.

No wonder Ban Ki-moon says this could be the start of the biggest civil society movement the world has ever seen. The governments have failed us on climate change; perhaps it’s time to give religion a chance.

Further reading

• Alliance of Religions and Conservation: http://www.arcworld.org