Climate change is prompting humanity to adopt a global vision, a keynote speaker told a Human Rights Day reception held in the information centre of Sydney’s Baha’i House of Worship on 9 December 2007.
“Through climate change we have come to realise our interdependence and our commonalities,” said Geoff Callaghan, Faith Project Officer for the Climate Institute.
“The effects of climate change will not discriminate between race or religion,” he said.
“It is a global problem that is helping us to realise we truly are one global community,” Mr Callaghan said.
Mr Callaghan said faith communities have great potential to show leadership on climate change, and to mobilise individuals to take action at the grass roots.
“Common Belief”, a compilation of statements on climate change by 16 Australian faith communities (including the Australian Baha’i Community), has become the most-downloaded document on the Climate Institute’s Web site, with 20,000 downloads to date, he said.
Building on this success, the Climate Institute is now setting up an interfaith network to address climate change, he said.
Mr Callaghan said he remained an optimist on the climate change issue.
“Climate change is a simple problem with a simple solution,” he said.
“The problem is that emissions from burning fossil fuels are heating up our atmosphere, so the solution is to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to clean sources of energy,” he said.
The European Union, and particularly Germany, is leading by example.”
Mr Callaghan said he was happy that Australia was ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and was working with other countries on the global response to climate change.
But he warned that climate change has the potential to compromise basic human rights, with the most vulnerable and poorest people most at risk.
He identified clean air, safe drinking water, and access to food and housing as basic resources that could be threatened by unchecked climate change.
Poorer communities will be unable to adopt expensive solutions, and the competition for dwindling resources could lead to increased conflict, he said.
“It’s the rights of the voiceless generations to come that will be most compromised by climate change,” Mr Callaghan said.
Following Mr Callaghan’s talk, the annual Human Rights Day service was held in the Baha’i House of Worship. The service included readings from the Scriptures of the world’s great religions.