Summary of Implications for Academics, Policymakers, and Practitioners Across and Between Religious and Secular Contexts

Climate change, and its many effects, is leading to profound environmental and social transformations around the world. The negative impacts of these transformations are exacerbated by forms of social and environmental injustice. Religion has the significant potential to alleviate these negative impacts due to its pervasiveness. Academics, policymakers, and practitioners would benefit from interreligious and interdisciplinary dialogs and collaboration across secular and religious spheres to create sustainable and culturally nuanced pathways for the survival of the earth. This chapter introduces summaries for seven of the main arguments we make in this book that we will develop over the course of the following chapters. These include the importance of creating discussions across religious and scientific communities, approaching religion in a more nuanced way, the importance of focusing on individual beliefs as well as states and institutions, incorporating local worldviews into policy in meaningful ways, the significance of understanding conceptions of the environment in complicated and varied ways across different cultural contexts, taking into account Indigenous perspectives, and finally, taking into account the varied impacts climate change has on community in developing policy and action plans.