Faith communities and fossil fuels

On 24 April in Santa Marta, Colombia, faith communities gathered for the Meeting of Spiritualities for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, an ecumenical and interfaith gathering convened as part of the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, hosted by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands. Their purpose was concrete: align their collective voice behind a binding Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Fossil Fuels, and deliver a signed declaration to the government representatives present.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) was among the organisers and participants. Athena Peralta, director of the WCC Commission on Climate Justice and Sustainable Development [and a member of the IF20 environment working group chaired by Arthur Dahl], did not soften the diagnosis: the climate emergency is not merely an environmental problem. “We are not living in the Anthropocene,” she said. “We are living in the "Capitolocene," an era shaped by an extractivist capitalism that treats the Earth as a storehouse of assets and a field for endless profit.”

Peralta's contribution was both theological and political, a call for spiritualities of sufficiency, resistance, and transformation – a turning away from the logic of accumulation toward what she called “enough."

Drawing on the WCC's Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action (2025–2034), she invited those gathered into a "prophetic uprising. Churches [and people of good will] are called to rise with prophetic urgency, speak with a voice of moral clarity, and embody a new Exodus – an exodus from the captivity of greed, a departure from an extractive economy, and a journey toward the freedom of a restored creation."

Dr Luz Dary Carmona, vice minister of Environmental Territorial Planning at Colombia's Ministry of Environment, insisted the transition reaches far beyond energy. It demands a transformation of the productive model and the very logic of development. She quoted Colombian president Gustavo Petro: "The life of the U'wa people is worth more than oil."

Kumi Naidoo, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and former general secretary of Amnesty International, was direct: "It is like leaving a tap running. Do you mop the floor or turn off the tap? First, you turn off the tap. Unless we shut off fossil fuels, we cannot deal with climate change."

Jocabed Reina Solano Miselis, executive director of Memoria Indígena Panamá and an Indigenous Guna theologian, was clear: "A transition without transformation is a transition without a soul. Without Indigenous rights, it does not respect life."

As the afternoon closed, more than 20 organisations, among them the WCC, signed and formally handed over the Call from the Ecumenical, Interfaith and Eco-Spiritual Coalition of the Global South to the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands, committing to an immediate end to new coal, oil, and gas development.

As the coalition looks toward COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, what was signed in Santa Marta is both a commitment and an invitation for churches, spiritual communities, and people of goodwill to keep walking together toward the fossil-free future they declared possible.

SOURCE: based on https://www.oikoumene.org/news/gathered-in-colombia-faith-communities-b…