13490 ______________________________________________________________ DOI: https://doi.org/10.33258/birci.v4i4.3426 Mitigating Emerging Environmental Issues in the Contemporary World: the Role of Faith-based organisations and Implications for their Growth in Nigeria J. I. Offor 1 , J. E. Umunnakwe 2 1 Lecturer, Agric Sc. Dept., Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education, Owerri 2 Lecturer, Dept. of Environmental Management, Federal University of Technology Owerri jnboscokwe@yahoo.com I. Introduction Emerging environmental problems in the last decades have been accumulated to the old ones, bringing new challenges to international and national environmental protection institutions (Valavanidis, 2019). At the outset it is important to point out that ‘emerging issues’ is a subjective concept. What qualifies as ‘emerging’ to one community may be yesterday’s news to another. Here emerging is meant to apply to those issues already recognized by the scientific community but thought to be insufficiently attended to by the policy community and the rest of the society (UNEP, 2012). The emerging issue must be critical to the global environment and must be environmental in nature or environmentally related. The issue has to be of a large spatial scale. It should either be global, continental or “universal” in nature (by “universal” we mean an issue occurring in many places around the world). The recognition of an issue as ‘emerging’ is based on newness. Newness of an issue can be as a result of new scientific knowledge, new scales or accelerated rates of impact, a heightened level of awareness, and, or new ways to respond to the issue (UNEP, 2012). Abstract The world today is confronted with many different emerging environmental issues. The recognition of an issue as ‘emerging’ is based on newness. Newness of an issue can be as a result of new scientific knowledge, new scales or accelerated rates of impact, a heightened level of awareness, and, or new ways to respond to the issue. This paper highlighted major emerging environmental challenges, to include: climate change, ozone layer depletion, energy crisis, biodiversity loss, flooding, overpopulation, and pollution. Scientific/policy solutions to environmental issues were discussed. The paper revealed the difficulty of finding universal solutions to environmental problems. A new strategy is needed to inflict urgency of environmental protection that can relate to any person’s principles no matter their walk of life. For this reason, it was necessary to evaluate the legitimacy of the church, a veritable faith-based organisation as a possible motivation and tool to mitigate environmental challenges. Christianity with their large numbers in Nigeria was seen as having the potency to make people obey environmental laws; educate people on the need to be environmentally friendly in all their activities- the ‘green church’ was recommended in the paper. It was asserted that the green church will attract more worshippers, therefore leading to church growth in the 21 st century. Keywords Emerging issues; green church; faith-based; church growth, mitigation