Faith-Based Environmental Stewardship and Climate Justice: A Systematic Literature Review of Religious Contributions to Sustainability
Keywords:
Environmental Ethics, Climate Justice, Eco-Theology, Religious Actors, Sustainability Transitions, Ecological StewardshipAbstract
This review synthesized global scholarship on faith-based environmental stewardship and climate justice to identify the ethical principles, institutional roles, and implementation gaps associated with religious contributions to sustainability. A systematic literature review guided by PRISMA 2020 was conducted on a curated corpus of 46 sources, including peer-reviewed articles, review papers, and official institutional documents published mainly between 2019 and 2025. The corpus was coded thematically across three analytic layers: normative claims, organizational mechanisms, and sustainability outcomes. The review identified six recurring themes: stewardship, climate justice, moral responsibility, ecological interdependence, community mobilization, and institutional translation. Religious actors contributed to sustainability through preaching, education, advocacy, material transitions, and grassroots activism. Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and comparative sources converged on the moral urgency of ecological care, but they diverged in how they articulated authority, agency, and accountability. The largest gap concerned implementation, because many texts expressed strong moral commitments without specifying governance mechanisms, monitoring practices, or equity safeguards. Faith-based environmental stewardship is a substantive ethical resource for climate justice, yet its sustainability impact depends on institutional translation from moral language into durable practice. The review offers a comparative framework for scholars and policymakers seeking to align religious ethics with sustainability transitions.
References
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Church of England. (2024a). Artificial Intelligence Advice 2024.
Church of England. (2024b). Synod affirms work as key to “human dignity and purpose” in face of AI revolution.
Francis. (2024a). Artificial intelligence and the wisdom of the heart: Message for the 58th World Day of Social Communications.
Francis. (2024b). Message of the Holy Father to Participants in the “AI and peace” conference.
Goltz, N., Zeleznikow, J., & Dowdeswell, T. (2020). From the tree of knowledge and the golem of Prague to kosher autonomous cars: The ethics of artificial intelligence through Jewish eyes. Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 9(1), 132–156. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojlr/rwaa015
Jobin, A., Ienca, M., & Vayena, E. (2019). The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(9), 389–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2
Mau, M., Hulu, W., & Faot, S. Y. I. (2024). Artificial intelligence ethics within Christian pedagogy: Reconstructing faith-based educational discourses in the era of algorithmic culture. International Perspectives in Christian Education and Philosophy, 1(3), 44–59. https://doi.org/10.61132/ipcep.v1i3.525
Methodist Church. (2025a). Artificial intelligence report.
Methodist Church. (2025b). Embracing AI with care and caution: Interim guidance for Methodist churches.
Mittelstadt, B. (2019). Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(7), 501–507. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4
OECD. (2019). OECD AI principles.
OECD. (2024). OECD Ipdates AI Principles to Stay Abreast of Rapid Technological Developments.
Page, M. J., McKenzie, J. E., Bossuyt, P. M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, T. C., Mulrow, C. D., et al. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement: An updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ, 372, Article n71. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71
Pontifical Academy for Life. (2020). Rome Call for AI Ethics.
Rappaport, Z. H. (2006). Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: Jewish Ethical Perspectives. In C. Nimsky & R. Fahlbusch (Eds.), Medical technologies in neurosurgery (Acta Neurochirurgica Supplements, Vol. 98, pp. 9–12). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-33303-7_2
Resnik, D. B., & Hosseini, M. (2025). The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific research: New guidance needed for a new tool. AI and Ethics, 5, 1499–1521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00493-8
Selbst, A. D., Boyd, D., Friedler, S. A., Venkatasubramanian, S., & Vertesi, J. (2019). Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), Article 59. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598
Smuha, N. A. (2022). The human condition in an algorithmized world: A critique through the lens of 20th-century Jewish thinkers and the concepts of rationality, alterity and history. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4093683
UNESCO. (2024). Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, & Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. (2025a). Antiqua et nova.
Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, & Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. (2025b). Antiqua et nova: Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
Yampolskiy, R. V. (2013). Artificial intelligence safety engineering: Why machine ethics is a wrong approach. In The philosophy and theory of artificial intelligence (pp. 389–396). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31674-6_29
