Religious leaders should play a frontline role in mobilising people to take action against global warming, according to a leading scientist.
Lord May, a former chief scientist to the government, said religious groups could use their influence to motivate believers into reducing the environmental impact of their lives.
The international reach of faith-based organisations and their authoritarian structures give religious groups an almost unrivalled ability to encourage a large proportion of the world's population to go green, he said.
Lord May highlighted the value of religion in uniting communities to tackle environmental challenges ahead of his presidential address to the British Science Association festival at the University of Surrey in Guildford today.
He will use the address to raise what Charles Darwin considered one of the great unsolved problems of his time: the evolution of co-operation. While scientists can explain the emergence of co-operative behaviour in small, related groups of animals, understanding co-operation among distant human societies has been more difficult, he said.
May will argue that the puzzle is as pressing today as it was to Darwin 150 years ago, because of the urgent need for global co-operation to tackle the environmental issues of water shortages, greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable energy consumption.
The world's population has risen roughly sevenfold since Darwin's day, with a similar increase in the amount of energy each individual uses. That suggests the ecological footprint of humanity upon the planet has increased fiftyfold since Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859.
"In all of this, probably the biggest difficulty is that globally co-operative actions are required. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that not only must nations co-operate, but – given past history – they must do so in equitable proportions," May will say, according to an advance copy of his address.
Experiments using what scientists call "game theory" show that groups of people can achieve their goals if cheats and those who fail to pull their weight are punished.
Speaking before the address, May said religion had historically played a major role in policing social behaviour through the notion of a supernatural "enforcer", a system that could help unify communities to tackle environmental challenges. "How better it is if the punisher is an all-powerful, all-seeing deity," he said.
According to May, humans are causing enough damage to ecosystems that we may have to resort to dramatic engineering projects to replace the roles they play in sustaining the planet, such as stabilising the climate, purifying water and pollinating crops.
"Maybe we could be clever enough artificially to engineer substitutes for these lost ecosystem services, although I fear this could see us living, at best, in the world of the cult movie, Blade Runner, and more likely Mad Max," his address states.