2014 Anglican Alliance G20 Campaign

July 10, 2014

The Anglican Alliance has distributed this information and ABM is proud to support this initiative.

The Anglican Alliance is standing with a coalition of Anglican churches and agencies to call on the G20 to bring climate change to the top of their agenda when they meet in Brisbane in November 2014.   

The “Oceans of Justice campaign” will bring Anglican voices from the Pacific together with others from the 85 million strong global Anglican Communion to highlight climate change and food security as a top priority for action.

Tagolyn Kabekabe, the Anglican Alliance’s Facilitator for the Pacific, launched the campaign when she quoted Amos 5:24 and said, “Do you know what we want? We want justice—oceans of it. We want fairness—rivers of it. That’s what we want. That’s all we want.”

In countless countries, in every region of the world, local communities are facing the very real effects of climate change and struggling to overcome its obstacles to ending poverty.  As the G20 look to foster more sustainable economic growth they must address climate change as an urgent priority. 

Yet climate change has been omitted from the G20 agenda. When Civil Society groups met at the C20 Summit in Melbourne in June, they called on the Australian Government to include climate change on the G20 agenda, saying, “There can be no sustained economic growth without governments attending to the urgent ramifications of climate change.”

Tagolyn Kabekabe told the C20, “With the small islands that make up the Pacific, every day people are affected by rising sea levels and inundation of land used to grow food.”  She pointed out that churches are already dealing with the resettlement of climate change refugees in the Pacific, and called on G20 countries to do more to stop climate change and to assist adaptation and mitigation work in small island countries, and others communities across the world.

Just last week the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia unanimously passed a motion calling on the Australian government “to respect and act upon relevant independent evidence-based scientific advice as a core basis for making decisions” in regard to climate change.

Oceans of Justice demands attention from the leaders of the top 20 richest nations and calls on the Australian Government to add climate change as a standalone item to the G20 agenda. The call for justice will continue to hold G20 leaders to account on climate change and its effects on those most vulnerable.

You can see more about the campaign at http://anglicanalliance.org/pages/8505 

And add your voice to the call at http://anglicanalliance.org/Advocacy/oceans-of-justice