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As nations are spelling out their bargaining positions for the negotiations on a new international climate deal to take place in Copenhagen next month, churches around the world are trying to ring home the message that climate protection is an ethical and spiritual issue.

Resettlement of people displaced by the consequences of climate change was highlighted as a major concern for churches at a gathering of ecumenical representatives from Asia and the Pacific region.

On the eve of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), World Council of Churches (WCC) president from North America, Rev. Dr Bernice Powell Jackson will join more than 25 Christian, Jewish and Islamic religious leaders from the United States at a 22-23 September Faith Leaders Summit to press for actions – not just words – that will help hungry and poor people lift themselves out of poverty.

The WCC Central Committee on Wednesday, 2 September adopted a statement on just finance and the economy of life. The statement notes that the global financial system has "enriched some people but has harmed many more, creating poverty, unemployment, hunger and death" and "widening the gap between rich and poor".

The recent incidents of violence in Bagua, Peru are "but one instance of a series of government actions to abrogate the rights of the Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon over land and resources", stated the World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia in a 9 June letter to President Alan García Pérez.

In a message for World Environment Day, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has stressed that "the care for and protection of Creation constitutes the responsibility of everyone on an individual and collective level."

The current global financial crisis must be more than just an occasion for "short term financial bail out actions." It must be viewed as an opportunity to seek "long term transformation based on sound ethical and moral principles". As a result, a "new financial architecture" should be developed "under the aegis of the United Nations where broad participation of all countries and the civil society could take place".

No doubt the global financial crisis is and will continue impacting negatively all regions of the world, but according to an advisory body of the World Council of Churches (WCC) it also represents an opportunity to deeply transform the international financial system for good.

By Dr Manoj Kurian (*)

By Juan Michel (*)

In Haiti, "the deadliest form of violence is extreme poverty, and the grimmest insecurity is food insecurity," according to a Living Letters team who visited the Caribbean nation on behalf of the World Council of Churches (WCC) last November.

The myth according to which host countries are "victims" of migration needs to be challenged, as in fact their economies benefit from the exploitation of the migrants' work.

Radical changes and tangible commitments from world leaders are needed if an equitable and sustainable global economic system is to be built, says an ecumenical delegation attending a UN conference on financing for development starting tomorrow in Qatar.

For one billion of the world population, "living with constant hunger" is "a normal state". However, there is nothing normal about that fact, which is "a result of the ways our societies have chosen to produce, share, buy and sell food".

"Please remind the world that we are no longer at war," a high-ranking government official from Sierra Leone told an international ecumenical team visiting churches and ecumenical organizations in Liberia and Sierra Leone from 2 to 8 November.

There is a "gradual retreat of neoliberalism" in the region, according to participants in a Latin America and Caribbean ecumenical consultation to examine the links between poverty, wealth and ecology.

The spiritual and moral dimension s of climate change are best shown by how it affects the poorest and most vulnerable, says the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in a message marking 1 September as a day of prayer for God's creation.

"Our world may soon have a billion people living with constant hunger but we produce enough food to feed double the current global population if everyone shared equally," said Archbishop Desmond Tutu as G8 leaders prepare to meet in Japan. "World leaders must seek justice in solutions to the food crisis that now faces us."

With an estimated 850 million people suffering from hunger worldwide, nine out of ten of which live in developing countries, "the scandal of hunger demands the immediate attention of the churches", affirmed today in a statement the World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia.

A wide array of justice movements around the world are challenging churches to create new kinds of spirituality that will sustain them as they struggle against empire.