Now the deal must be made to stick

Climate scientists have expressed more than a suspicion that recent exceptional rainfall in Britain, leading to widespread flooding, damage to property and resulting human misery, can be attributed to changes in the weather due to human activity – global warming. It was a coincidence that this domestic disaster coincided with the Paris talks on limiting climate change, but that fact underlined how relevant the issue is to everyday life. The talks achieved the remarkable breakthrough of having 195 national governments sign up to a comprehensive agreement on what to do about this threat to the viability of Planet Earth, which has made many peoples and places far more vulnerable than those recently deluged British towns and villages. Millions risk being displaced with the loss of their homes, their livelihoods and even their lives.

After the Paris agreement had been met with almost disbelieving euphoria, however, reality soon asserted itself. Global warming has not been solved; the planet is still at risk. What has been put in place is a process that, if followed faithfully, should limit it on average over the next half-century to somewhere around two degrees. Pessimists say more, optimists less. Both agree that damage will still occur and will have to be dealt with. What is most significant is that the world community has come together to recognise that this is above all a moral issue rather than just an economic, technical or political one: the present inhabitants of the planet simply do not have the right to destroy the environment for future generations. And in making the moral case, no voice has been more resonant than that of Pope Francis.

But pressure will have to go on being applied for decades. The Paris agreement required governments to put national self-interest behind the interests of the world community, which for many politicians will run counter to their natural instincts. The temptations to revert to type will be huge. Examples are everywhere. A week before the Paris conference opened, the British Government announced that, purely as an economy in the name of reducing the national deficit, it was cancelling a promising research project into carbon capture. This is the process of extracting organic greenhouse gases from waste discharged into the atmosphere, so that they can be permanently and safely stored on land. At the same time, the Government is pressing ahead with projects to extract oil from shale by the process called fracking.

Aside from other worrying side effects, this could only be justified environmentally if a proper carbon capture scheme was in place. The Government has also backed away from investing in other projects designed to produce sustainable energy without further pollution of the atmosphere. Demonstrably, there is a real need not just for environmental activists but for all who claim to speak in the name of the common good, including Christian Churches and other faith communities, to create a political environment in which anything less than full compliance with the Paris agreement is unthinkable. That means constantly monitoring what governments do, as well as influencing leaders of environmentally sensitive industries. It means speaking out and lobbying where necessary, and not being afraid of controversy. That also means developing the right expertise, so that what they say is well founded and not easily fobbed off. No national Church has yet risen adequately to this challenge. Unless they do, if the Paris process eventually fails, they will share responsibility for that failure.