Friends’ Global Responses to Climate Crisis
Global warming has made the earth’s atmosphere more humid, intensified precipitation, and caused glaciers to melt rapidly, according to a 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate change has disrupted the water cycle around the globe, which has led to more droughts, arid land, wildfires, and floods, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
More frequent and severe natural disasters that result from climate change take human lives, cause homelessness, and threaten people’s health, both physical and mental. Quakers around the world are drawing on their spiritual resources to respond to climate-related calamities.
Mercy Miroya, a member of Mukuyu Meeting in Kenya, views responding to climate-related problems as an essential part of following God.
“God mandated us to guard and cultivate the land,” Miroya said. Kenya is a water-scarce country with widespread poverty, according to Miroya. She teaches others of the need to plant native trees to conserve water.
Around 1902, the colonial government brought eucalyptus trees to Kenya to provide wood to fuel the railroad running from Kenya to Uganda, Miroya explained. Eucalyptus forests currently occupy about 250,000 acres in Kenya. Each eucalyptus tree consumes about 100 liters of water each day, according to Miroya.
“The rapid growth and economic benefits of eucalyptus, such as providing timber, fuel, and construction materials have made them popular among Kenyan farmers. However, concerns have emerged regarding their environmental impact, particularly on water resources,” Miroya said. Eucalyptus trees’ large water consumption leads to groundwater depletion and the draining of rivers and wetlands, Miroya explained.
Miroya organizes and educates community members, especially in the Kitale region of Kenya, to advocate for removal of eucalyptus trees in riparian zones. For the past eight months, Miroya has collaborated with residents of the Kitale region to chop down eucalyptus trees growing near bodies of water. Miroya received a Millennium Fellowship, which offered training to support her work toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 6: clean water and sanitation. The Jiinue Community Based Organization in Kitale also supported her efforts. Miroya’s tree planting program along the Nzoia River focuses on native trees that consume less water than eucalyptus do. The group has planted 85,000 indigenous trees.
“Such actions are vital in mitigating the adverse effects of climate change on water and food security in Kenya,” Miroya said.

A shifting climate threatens food security around the world. Climate change has brought extreme weather to Bolivia. It has also shortened and lengthened growing seasons unpredictably, decimating the country’s staple potato crops. In 2022, the country experienced a crushing lengthy drought, according to Emma Condori Mamani, director of Friends International Bilingual Center (FIBC). The center started its Food Security Project the next year. The project distributed potatoes for food and planting. It also gave out rice, oil, and sugar in both the jungle and the highland.
“In the highland there is only one harvest season, so too much rain or drought destroys the potato crops. For these families potatoes are the main food item. Then this situation of losing the potato crop makes them vulnerable to starvation,” said Mamani, who is a member of Holiness Friends Yearly Meeting in Bolivia.
In 2023, the project began by raising funds for ten families, or about $500 in U.S. currency. They subsequently sought to raise $7,500. Individual Friends as well as larger Quaker organizations have supported the project, according to Mamani.
Bolivian young adult Friends are the primary volunteers responsible for the project. They survey the impact of floods and droughts on communities, including Indigenous villages. The young adult Friends also coordinate with village authorities, as well as distribute potatoes and other food. They share their time on Saturdays because they study and work during the week.
In the Asia–West Pacific region, climate change has disrupted both the dry and the rainy season, ruining the planting-harvest cycle, according to Kins Aparece, initiative coordinator of the Asia– West Pacific regional team of Friends Peace Teams. Flooding destroys crops, and small farmers typically cannot afford to insure their harvests. Droughts also occur, which make crops more likely to fail. Calamities raise prices by reducing the supply of agricultural goods. Farmers go into debt and often cannot repay their loans when their harvests fail, Aparece explained.

In addition to economic devastation, climate change causes public health problems such as increased disease and mental illness. Upper respiratory infections become more common as temperatures increase, Aparece explained. When megacities flood, rats come out and spread disease, according to Aparece. Sanitation systems collapse. Diseases attack people’s open wounds, often fatally.
In the immediate aftermath of calamities, survivors need food and water. After two or three weeks, they need a source of income, making them vulnerable to human traffickers.
Calamity survivors also suffer from malnutrition. First responders distribute instant noodles, which yields a lot of plastic waste. Lack of soap to clean utensils leads to increased spread of communicable diseases. For instance, the number of tuberculosis cases rises.
When disasters destroy people’s houses, they seek refuge in public buildings such as schools. The shelters are extremely cold, according to Aparece. In such congregate settings, refugees—including children—suffer abuse and sexual assault, Aparece explained.
Aparece recalled one instance of traumatized mothers and grandmothers being unable to sleep while staying in a gymnasium. The storm survivors explained that the sound of a creaking piece of galvanized iron kept them awake because it sounded like the typhoon they had just been through.
On December 16, 2021, a typhoon struck the Philippines. Aparece went to the affected zone to provide COVID masks and food packs. Many survivors believed that the typhoon had washed away all the COVID germs, Aparece explained.
Aparece went to the islands of the Philippines and asked storm survivors what they needed. They said they particularly wanted fishing boats, so they could get food and rebuild their lives, she explained. Quakers gave about 30 fishing boats to the poorest of the poor.
People often use calamity as a communal reference point, such as asking others where they were when a typhoon struck, Aparece explained. Survivors have extended families and neighbors with whom they spend time talking and laughing, which promotes healing.
Aparece recalled a training she attended at which the facilitators showed a 30-minute film containing natural disaster footage. The participants were frozen. Aparece encouraged them to move, realizing that they had not healed from their own experience of natural disaster.
One disaster area that Aparece visited had no water, no food, and no stove. She visited the area several times, two to three months apart. She offered trauma response workshops inspired by the Alternatives to Violence Project. Mothers were the first to be trained. The workshops encouraged laughter, shouting, and playing. They sought to get away from the idea that survivors are weak or not connected to God if they show strong emotions.
Mental health professionals are sometimes deployed to disaster zones, but there are rarely enough of them to address the needs of the thousands of people impacted by a calamity at one time, Aparece explained. Mental health workers also need specific training to help people who have survived natural disasters, she noted.
Clinicians sometimes work with survivors in groups and other times they see clients individually.
“Getting healed in a community is way more efficient,” Aparece said.

Living in ongoing fear of weather-related catastrophes causes mental health issues, as do the disasters themselves, explained Adrian Glamorgan, executive secretary of the Friends Word Committee for Consultation (FWCC) Asia–West Pacific Section.
“When you see a house that you built over ten years washed away in ten minutes, there’s a lot of grief,” Glamorgan said.
Many residents of the Asia–West Pacific region live in poverty, according to Glamorgan. In Bangladesh, increased flooding has displaced 140 million people. Such catastrophes create anger, tension, and uncertainty.
FWCC’s Asia–West Pacific Section’s (AWPS) response to climate change is to offer networking opportunities to people suffering the effects of climate change. The section does not have money to give away in general, Glamorgan noted. Connecting transnationally is essential, according to Glamorgan. Media and national politicians often present stories of climate change as existing within the boundaries of nation states rather than acknowledging its global causes and implications, Glamorgan observed.
AWPS offers webinars in which inhabitants of the region who have experienced climate-related disasters exchange stories. AWPS also invites residents to share stories of efforts that promote resilience and such projects as renewable energy, according to Glamorgan. One such anecdote concerned the danger of flooding to women in regions where it is culturally inappropriate to teach women to swim, Glamorgan noted. After a climate change-related disaster, the community often relies on women to restore social cohesion.
Global networking leads individuals to realize that climate change is a transnational problem, Glamorgan observed. When climate change causes people to evacuate uninhabitable areas, cultures, lifeways, and connections are lost to the present generation’s grandchildren.
“It’s just obvious that this is happening around the world,” Glamorgan said.
The Quaker testimonies are interconnected, Glamorgan observed. Justice is a big part of the testimonies. The peace testimony calls on Quakers to welcome and support climate refugees.

The Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) lives out the peace testimony by supporting UN efforts to address climate change, according to Lindsey Fielder Cook, QUNO’s representative for the Human Impacts of Climate Change Programme. QUNO advocates climate change solutions that protect human rights rather than “technofixes” and “false solutions,” as Fielder Cook describes them. QUNO representatives work at climate change negotiations by offering spaces for what they call “quiet diplomacy.” Quiet diplomacy offers negotiators an opportunity to speak off-the-record and personally, according to Fielder Cook, who works in QUNO’s Geneva office. In side meetings at global climate summits such as COP29, as well as during the year between such negotiations, they can discuss climate change with countries with whom they don’t want to be seen talking with publicly. For example, diplomats for countries at war can speak personally about potential shared goals.
QUNO staff write publications to give to negotiators pursuing climate pacts. The amount spent on militaries worldwide is $2.4 trillion. Some of this money could be redirected to responding to climate change.
Fielder Cook advocates for grants to developing countries rather than loans that lead to insurmountable debt. Other improvements that Fielder Cook suggests include a fossil fuel tax, an aviation tax, and shifting military spending to address climate change.
QUNO communicates with Quakers around the world. If QUNO staffers see a country that promised money to developing nations seeking to address climate change, QUNO lets Quakers in the region know what is happening on the ground so they can advocate for accountability, Fielder Cook noted. She speaks to monthly and yearly meetings as well as other Quaker organizations to promote climate activism.
Most people around the globe do not see politicians responding to climate change, addressing the root causes, promoting sustainable growth of food, endorsing more equitable building of homes, and increasing tree planting, Fielder Cook explained. Lack of commitment by political leaders highlights the need for grassroots action, she observed.
Quakers are the only faith-based group that advises the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We as Quakers are viewed as the ethical voice in the room,” Fielder Cook said.

Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) is looking at how climate change is impacting people’s livelihoods, according to Evan Welkin, executive secretary of FWCC Section of the Americas and a member of Olympia (Wash.) Meeting. Welkin is a climate migrant because his farm in Italy was devastated by flooding and landslides in 2024.
FWCC’s Climate Emergency Fund was established by the FWCC World Office and the Europe and Middle East Section (EMES). Any future travel taken to FWCC events will be recorded for its climate impact, and the cost will be paid into the climate emergency fund, according to Welkin. The money from the various sections would then be earmarked for small grants people can apply for. The World Office and EMES have a tool to calculate climate impact. The tool gathers information about journeys and calculates the total carbon output, which is put into a formula.
Friends had questions about the ethics of anonymous offsetting programs and wanted to contribute to onsetting by creating the Climate Emergency Fund. The emergency fund contributed to the seed potato project in Bolivia.
Another transnational tool available to Friends concerned about climate change is an online map that Quaker Earthcare Witness (QEW) developed in conjunction with FWCC. Individual users, as well as those from monthly meetings, can use tags and filters to research what other Friends in their area and around the world are doing to address climate change, according to Keith Runyan, general secretary of QEW and a member of Grass Valley (Calif.) Meeting.
The map generates hope and enables Friends to progress toward becoming an eco-faith, Runyan noted.
The map can support Quakers in celebrating each meeting’s efforts to respond to climate change. It is important to celebrate action projects, Runyan explained. Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) is partnering with QEW to spread climate activism. Runyan envisions Quaker meetings becoming resiliency hubs by providing food, water, shelter, and power when climate change-induced disasters occur. Friends meetings can also serve as centers for spiritual grounding in the wake of calamity. The map is the first phase of a campaign to help meetings build resilience to climate change.
Runyan compared the current moment to renewals Quakers experienced during the Vietnam War and the movement for the abolition of slavery. Quaker moral leadership comes not from a place of vitriol but rather a sense of deeply grounded spirituality, Runyan noted. Quakers attract people by being at the moral forefront of society, according to Runyan.
“We do it by being emblems of change,” Runyan said.
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