COP26 and the Churches in Ireland: what does it mean for us?
WE HAVE recently seen our national leaders hammer out an agreement that is supposed to prevent a global catastrophe. But some are already facing catastrophe. In 2017, with a team from Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, I visited ‘Mediterranean Hope’, a project of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI) on the island of Lampedusa.
I spoke to a young man called Albert on the quayside who in desperation had left his family farm in a village in Eastern Gambia because it was no longer fertile enough to provide for his family, as it had done for generations. He crossed the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean sea at huge risk to his life. Imagine the hopelessness he felt to cause him to undertake such a dangerous journey with no certainty of a better future at its end.
* Full article available in printed copies.
Damian Jackson
is Programme Officer of the Irish Council of Churches and Irish Inter-Church Meeting