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Climate and Resilience

We have a shared responsibility to care for and equip climate-vulnerable communities.

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How we Help

Climate change affects us all, but not equally. Anglican Missions works with communities and local churches as part of a wider, shared response to climate change, recognising that those who have contributed least to the crisis often experience its impacts most acutely. Our role is to stand alongside communities, support practical climate adaptation strategies, and strengthen local disaster preparedness capacity so people can respond with dignity and resilience. 

You can partner with us to support climate justice and create a sustainable future through your donation to the Climate and Justice programme 

Justice for People.

Communities least responsible for the causes of climate change often suffer the most from its effects.

Climate Change is an Equity Issue.

Climate change is not only an environmental challenge; it is also a justice issue. Low lying coastal communities, small island states, and rural households dependent on land and water are already experiencing rising sea levels, more extreme weather events and increasing pressure on livelihoods.  

Human well-being depends on a healthy planet, including clean water, fertile soil, stable weather patterns, and functioning ecosystems. When these systems are disrupted, existing inequalities are deepened. Climate justice requires responses that address inequalities, respond to systemic issues, and empower vulnerable communities to adapt and flourish.  The protection of this earth is everyone’s responsibility, and it starts with providing equitable and just solutions for underserved communities, especially those facing heightened effects of climate change. 

For Anglican Missions, justice for people means focusing on equity, local leadership and inclusionOur climate resilience programme includes work such as sustainable agriculture, protecting water sources, restoring soil, and supporting approaches grounded in kaitiakitanga and stewardship of creation. 

Disaster Preparedness and Resilience.

Disaster Preparedness allows communities to respond more effectively when disasters occur.

Disaster Preparedness

Anglican Missions also supports climate resilience through our work in disaster preparedness. As climate change exacerbates and disasters are more frequent, only focusing on disaster mitigation and response is insufficient for climate-vulnerable communities. That’s why we focus on walking alongside communities to develop disaster preparedness committees and create disaster response plans. Through disaster preparedness, communities can strengthen their responses before disaster occurs, respond immediately after, and recover much quicker.

Our work in disaster preparedness equips local faith communities to serve their communities before, during, and after disaster strikes. Within faith communties, members are regularly involved across the community, are well networked, and have integral knowledge of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the community. They operate with pre-existing values and principles of manaakitanga (hospitality, generosity, and support), kaitiakitanga (stewardship), whanaungatanga (relationship), and Kotahitanga (collective action). Intentionally integrating these skills and principles enables faith communities to organise and respond effectively to disasters in coordination with other local actors. It also gives vulnerable communities, especially those in rural locations, the skillset to respond to disasters in places where government response is insufficient, slow, or nonexistent. 

Domestic Disaster Preparedness

Learn about the disaster preparedness work we are doing in Aotearoa and access our disaster preparedness toolkit.

Domestic Disaster Preparedness

People wonder...

Current emissions pathways, also known as RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) pathways, are models which show how greenhouse gas emission trajectories could evolve over time. According to these pathways, current policies in place globally are projected to result in about 2.6 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

So, what are the implications of this projection for the most vulnerable communities? While this depends heavily on community location, elevation, topography, and resilience, much of the world is expected to experience heightened flooding, longer periods of drought, erratic weather patterns, more pests, significant coastal erosion and inundation, and environmental degradation. The effects will be felt most acutely by coastal and low-lying communities.
Global warming has already had a permanent effect on disaster severity, and several natural disasters are directly impacted by the various effects of climate change. Some natural disasters directly influenced by climate change include:

Flooding. Flooding is intensifying due to changes in rainfall, storms, and temperatures, as well as anthropological factors such as floodplain development.

Hurricanes. Climate change is increasing atmospheric and ocean temperatures, as well as rising sea levels. The impact of this is an increase in peak wind speeds, storm surges, and rainfall rates, which intensify and lengthen hurricane duration.

Wildfires. On a small scale, wildfires can be productive to ecosystem growth. However, they are quickly intensified by hotter temperatures, longer drought periods, earlier snowmelt, and stronger winds, which cause catastrophic destruction to ecosystems.

Tornados. The frequency and strength of severe thunderstorms is also increasing, which amplifies the atmospheric conditions that develop intense and destructive tornados.

Communities can adapt and prepare for climate change by predicting its effects and equipping themselves to be resilient against them. To do this successfully, communities require both the knowledge to recognise its effects and the capacity to adapt in response.

For the communities that Anglican Missions works with, this can look like adopting resilient agriculture practices that increase yield, or building infrastructure that can withstand strong weather patterns and regular flooding. It also looks like facilitating the creation of disaster preparedness committees and plans

Solutions for climate adaptation must be sustainable, durable, and context specific.
Long-term relationships and change are at the core of Anglican Missions’ work. We work to ensure our projects create lasting change by:

Working through local churches. This means that the project is built on community voices and addresses true need straight from the start. Building church capacity also equips the church to replicate the project and pass knowledge on far into the future.

Working through local champions. Anglican Missions seeks to identify community champions early into the project design. In doing so, these champions can identify specific needs, choose the best solution, and rally the community to remain engaged and passionate long after the project’s end.

Focusing on training and education. Climate solutions aren’t helpful to a community unless they understand how to use them. Thus, our project activities concentrate on community capacity, knowledge, and engagement.

Love in action.

Anglican Missions expresses mission through our international project and humanitarian aid work. Check out some of these below:

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Our Mission is International.

Our work takes us into all parts of the world, and calls us to proclaim the love of God without discrimination and to whoever needs it.

Click the map pins to explore our work in different parts of the world.

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