Four Essentials of Climate Action

The Four Essentials for Climate Action present unique, but interconnected, areas that are critical to advancing climate justice.  While each represents a particular area of climate action, they are deeply intertwined.  

Image description: Four overlapping blue, yellow, red, and green circles inside a light gray cross hatched sphere. At the center of each circle is one of the four essentials: “Justice, Community Resilience, Mitigation, and Congregational Transformation.”

Congregational Transformation

Working together to improve the ways we organize and collaborate

  • Understand the dynamics in your congregation.

  • Collaborate with other justice teams and ministries. 

  • Shift from isolation to collaboration.

  • Embrace systemic change.

  • Organize for the long haul.

Community Resilience 

Preparing for and responding to climate disruption while cultivating community care

  • Understand how climate change harms your community—who, how, and where.

  • Understand the strengths and challenges for the ecosystem in your area.

  • Cultivate spiritual, relational, and infrastructural strength to prepare for and respond to climate disasters.

  • Create spaces to nourish your spirits by connecting with nature, art, and each other.

  • Collaborate with community partners to strengthen community resilience and care.

Justice 

Honoring the inherent worthiness and right for all to flourish

  • Understand how climate disruption, environmental injustice, and energy injustice impact some worse than others.

  • Follow frontline leadership and advance their priorities.

  • Collaborate with curiosity and humility.

  • Organize for collective liberation, embracing solidarity, not charity.

Mitigation 

Reducing the pollution that causes climate change

  • Understand the systems of extraction and consumption that cause climate change. 

  • Reduce resource usage in congregational buildings and grounds and individual homes and businesses.

  • Consider energy, water, transportation, waste, food choices and more.

  • Advocate for fair utility rates and access.


Your team will reflect on and plan actions that advance the four Essentials.  You may have four discrete actions, one for each Essential.  You may have one action that covers all four Essentials, or some combination.  That’s great!  Do what works for your congregation and your community.