St Mary's Church News

For your Diary

Ascension Day – Thursday 1 May – Holy Communion at 10.45 am
MU Centenary – Saturday 10 May – Mothers’ Union 100 Years in Lymm; Service 2.30 pm
Pentecost/Whitsun – Sunday 11 May
Christian Aid Week – Sunday 11 May to Saturday 17 May

Please see our web site http://www.stmaryslymm.org or the parish magazine for details of activities, services and meetings.

THE RECTOR WRITES

Dear friends

‘Time for action on climate change’

A selection of stories that made the national press in April: plans are under consideration to allow a significant chunk of the East Anglian coastline to be lost to the sea as a defence against future flooding; the Thames flood barrier had to be raised again, prompting concerns that the barrier itself may be inadequate to deal with projected rises in sea levels; a house in Scarborough lost its back garden when coastal erosion caused it to fall into the sea.

We know that climate change is a reality, but for many of us it may currently mean little more than debating whether to get a car with smaller CO2 emissions, being a little more energy conscious at home, or wondering what on earth happened to the regularity of our four seasons.

Yet for others, such discussions are a luxury. In coastal Bangladesh, for example, salt water is contaminating the water supply of riverbank and coastal communities. These communities also face losing homes to rapidly increasing river erosion. Christian Aid points out the ways climate change increases the unpredictability and severity of extreme weather patterns. During the past 35 years, hurricane-force storms have almost doubled. Eleven million people are threatened by hunger because of years of unpredictable drought in east Africa.

Ninety per cent of the victims of weather-related natural disasters during the 1990s were from poor countries. An estimated 150,000 people are dying every year from diseases made worse by the changing climate. And projections into the future make the outlook bleak. Even if the world were able to stabilise CO2 emissions, global average temperatures are still likely to rise by at least 2°C by 2050. In this case, up to 3 billion people will face acute
water shortages. Thirty million more people will go hungry as crops fail across the globe. A rise of one metre in sea levels would displace ten million people in Vietnam, about the same number in Egypt, and potentially submerge around 16 per cent of Bangladesh.

So Christian Aid Week this year (11-17 May) has a particular emphasis on the need for action in the face of climate change. The world’s poorest people have done least to contribute to the problem, yet they suffer the worst effects. The carbon that has fuelled our prosperity is now having a devastating impact on poor countries, who cannot develop in the same way. In short, climate change has become an issue of injustice, and is increasingly becoming a matter of life and death for many.

In the past, Christian Aid has campaigned on the need for fair trade and freedom from debt for the poorest countries to allow them a chance to develop their own economies. Now it is pressing for an international agreement for rich countries (that’s you and me) to cut their own CO2 emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, and to assist poor countries to develop in ways that will limit CO2 emissions. 80 per cent by 2050 means a cut of five per cent every year. Are we prepared to contemplate that? Are we prepared to act to try to make it a reality?

That’s the challenge this year’s Christian Aid Week throws out. The old slogan, ‘Think global: act local’ takes on a new lease of life, for climate change is no respecter of persons – it affects every single one of us. Those of us who believe that this truly is God’s world, and that we are stewards of it with a particular responsibility for its care and its sustainability, will see it also as a challenge to our faith: to take the action that God requires of his stewards.

It is time for action on climate change. Christians should be in the forefront of campaigning for it, and changing their own lifestyle accordingly.

Keith Maudsley
Rector
April 2008

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