What can churches do as banks feed the climate emergency?

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group held their 2026 Annual Meetings in Bangkok, Thailand, Oct. 12 to 18. At the same time, churches and civil society met at the International People's Assembly with a different question: How can money for climate action reach the countries that need it without adding to their debt?

A workshop on "From Debt to Climate Justice: Financing Just Transitions" took up that question. The World Council of Churches (WCC) organized the workshop with the All Africa Conference of Churches, Centre for Financial Accountability and World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC).

A just transition is a move away from fossil fuels that is fair to workers and communities. Participants looked at the role of multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, in financing climate action.

Philip Vinod Peacock, general secretary of the WCRC, said "capitalism has learned to commodify even disaster. When floods and cyclones strike, communities in the Global South are offered more loans, insurance products and investment opportunities, so their suffering becomes a new market.

"A crisis caused overwhelmingly by the wealthy is turned into debt for the poor and profit for others," he pointed out.

For Rev. Jackline Makena Mutuma of the Methodist Church in Kenya, loans are the wrong tool for climate and just-transition needs. "It's not about climate finance. It's handing the bill to the victims."

From 2020 to 2023, Kenya experienced the worst drought in four decades. Floods killed 291 people between March and May 2024. Now the government spends nearly half of its revenue on servicing debt, Jackline explained.

"This is the climate-debt trap: the more the climate hurts you, the more you pay for money," she said.

Mutuma called for grants, not loans, for adaptation, meaning coping with climate impacts already under way, and for loss and damage, the harm communities can no longer avoid or adapt to.

She also called for debt cancellation, wiping debts out, for automatic pauses in debt payments when disasters hit, and for recognition of the ecological debt owed for climate and environmental harm.

"Africa is not the debtor in this story," she said. "We are the creditors of an ecological debt that has never been paid."

For both church leaders, these are questions of faith. "Every day, Christians around the world pray in the Lord's Prayer, 'forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,'" said Peacock. "We cannot say those words in church on Sunday and accept a financial system on Monday that keeps whole nations in debt bondage."

"Scripture is not neutral on debt," said Mutumam pointing to the Jubilee of Leviticus 25, which calls for debts to be cancelled, and land restored every 50 years, and where God says, "the land is mine."

She also named Zacchaeus, the tax collector in Luke 19 who promised to repay those he had cheated. Churches "can call creditors who profit from disasters to repentance, the way Zacchaeus repented," she said. "Jubilee is not a favor that creditors grant. It is a correction that God commands."

Joe Athialy, executive director of the Centre for Financial Accountability, was asked what counts as "bankable," since the banks' models favor large, commercially attractive projects. Uhuru Dempers, head of the social development desk at the National Council of Churches in Namibia, was asked whether banks can tackle structural inequalities, and what should replace the dominant model.

The workshop was one of five WCC engagements around the annual meetings. On Oct. 12, the WCC joined the International People's Assembly. On Oct. 14, it took part in two events on wealth concentration and international tax cooperation. Both were co-organized by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, which the WCC co-founded, with Oxfam and other partners. That evening, the WCC hosted the webinar "Follow the Money: Multilateral Development Banks, Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice."

Faith groups carry the call for grants, not loans, to COP31, the UN climate conference in Antalya, Türkiye, from Nov. 9 to 20, as part of the Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action from 2025 to 2034.

World Council of Churches News: oikoumene.org/news