Abstract
How much is religion quantitatively involved in global climate politics? After assessing the role of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from a normative perspective, this descriptive, transdisciplinary and unconventional study offers the first comprehensive quantitative examination of religious nongovernmental organizations that formally participate in its annual meetings, the largest attempts to solve the climate crisis through global governance. This study finds that although their numbers are growing, only about 3 percent of registered nongovernmental organizations accredited to participate in the conference are overtly religious in nature—and that more than 80 percent of those faith-based groups are Christian. Additionally, this study finds that religious nongovernmental organizations that participate in the conference are mostly from the Global North. The results call for greater participation of religious institutions in the international climate negotiations in order for society to address the planetary emergency of climate change.
Highlights
The United Nations has built the annual meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP)i,ii,iii to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)iv into the preeminent international arena for addressing climate change and its related problems through global climate politics
After COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009, Miquel Muñoz Cabré researched all UNFCCCaccredited nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that participated in the COPs from 1995 to 2009 and classified them into 22 categories that basically expanded upon the nine categories employed by the UNFCCC
The number of religious NGOs that participate in the COP has increased dramatically—and those groups, and the World Council of Churches in particular [26], deserve plaudits—even after the growth, religious NGOs consist of a mere 3 percent of UNFCCC-accredited NGOs and about 4 percent of those registered to attend the COP
Summary
The United Nations has built the annual meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP)i,ii,iii to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)iv into the preeminent international arena for addressing climate change and its related problems through global climate politics. As will be discussed later in this paper, researched quantitative participation of religious groups at the COP [1], this new study constitutes the first comprehensive published attempt to determine the religious constituency of UNFCCC-accredited nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Given both their reach as well as their status as ethical authorities, religious institutions—and their leaders as people of the cloth, which I use here as a generic representative of a vestment of faith—are in a strong (and at this point largely unexercised) position to lead the world in environmental action [2]. Normative scholarship is becoming increasingly common in some fields such as international relations [7,8,9,10,11,12], when the object of inquiry relates to morals and ethics [7]—and some newer fields, such as sustainability, which “requires both a descriptive knowledge and a normative approach” [13], place normativity at the heart of their raisons d’être
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