Faith and Climate Change: Towards a Research Agenda
Climate change is an urgent – possibly existential – challenge to continued human flourishing on this planet. Clearly, it is a defining challenge to our longer-range future as a species. So much so that it might be difficult today to respond to that most important spiritual question – ‘What is a good life?’ – without reference to some discussion of environmental values and ecological virtue, and particularly to climate change. Yet, the climate policy discourse is nearly entirely in the language of science and economics with little effort to link these to the moral dimensions of human values and behavior.
The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) and the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University are collaborating on a future-oriented, interdisciplinary, and structured research initiative to explore the moral dimensions of climate action and the possible role of faith-based values in encouraging positive environmental and climate behaviors – particularly in the context of Islam and Muslim societies.
As part of this initiative, we are organizing two roundtables – one in Oxford, UK, and one in Boston, USA – to explore the dimensions of a possible research agenda on faith and climate change, particularly in the context of Islam and Muslim societies. Each roundtable will bring together scholars, policy experts, and activists from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss and identify a set of key research questions that might constitute the core of a research inquiry into faith and climate change.
The first Roundtable is being organized in Oxford on May 27-28 at OCIS and will also include a discussion panel, open to the public, on the evening of May 27. The Roundtable will be structured to be interactive and interdisciplinary. Participants will be asked to identify and discuss what they believe to be some of the most important and useful research questions working on which could advance understanding and action on environmental values and ecological virtue; particularly, but not solely, in the context of Islam and Muslim societies.
The second Roundtable will be held in Boston at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future on September 19-20, 2024, and will bring together US-based scholars and practitioners to discuss the topic in a similar format. The goal of the initiative is to produce a policy paper that identifies such an agenda and outlines some next steps towards its realization (expected early 2025).
The initiative is co-led by Prof. Adil Najam, a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow (2024-26) and the Mahathir Mohamad Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies and by Prof. Shahid Jameel, the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies and head of OCIS’s Program on Science, Technology, and Environment in Muslim Societies.