Climate changes and Spirituality: the community connection to their lands and enhanced resilience

This COP has seen the great rising in debate on adaptation and mitigation, national and regional plans and strategic measures on climate change.

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Strong importance has been also given to private sector and to the role of the society.
But climate change primarily strongly impact on communities, and their organization and collaborative efforts play an essential potential role on their resilience. In the side event Faith and Community Approach to Climate Change the role of the community, their cohesion and the connection between individuals – that faith rise – has been discussed on the discourse of climate change.

It can argued that climate change indeed, is not only a matter of mechanism, plans and strategy – but also and first of all – it address the local level. Climate change can be also connected to spiritual needs, and the spiritual and inner dimension is also a part of the community strength and preparedness. By several examples and stories of communities around the world the session, has shown how spirituality, community empowerment and capacity building at the small scale level represents an essential keypoint, to address adaptation and mitigation measures.

Among financial and planning action indeed is important to enhance the strong connections among individuals and communities and their ability they can take of their land can be at the basis in order to promote – the ownership and the sustainability of the actions and processes – by the community, said Kosha Jubert of Global Ecovillage foundation – GEF. GEF that supports more 100 thousands of communities , on the work of giving the communities the ownership on protecting their land and focusing on the participatory design process. The believes of GEFs is that the communities can sustain and regenerate their lands working together and this a great effort to enhance their resilience.

Another example have been given by Green Asia Network, where the land suffers by the 78% of Mongolia Suffer from desertification. Here people have been involved in planting threes, through participative and self-regenerative processes.
The session ended with an evocative prayer by Sister Jayanti from the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University to restore the inner peace of the audience and give energy to tackle climate change.