How Loka Initiative is Proving That Religion and Science Can Save the Earth, Together
Dekila Chungyalpa founded the Loka Initiative on a simple but radical premise: that the world’s faith communities may be the most powerful, and most underused, ally in the fight for our planet.
In 2007, she was sitting among roughly ten thousand Buddhist pilgrims in Bodh Gaya, India. The Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and her own spiritual teacher, had begun speaking about climate change. He spoke about compassion, about vegetarianism. And then he asked the crowd a simple question: how many of them were willing to give up eating meat, or even just make one meal vegetarian?
“A sea of hands went up, including my hand,” Chungyalpa recalls. “And in that moment, I had this out of body experience, that my faith leader is asking me to be a better Buddhist. This is one thing I can do, one way I can practically align myself to the values that I subscribe to.” Alongside her personal transformation was also a professional revelation: “As a scientist, I was looking around and going, oh my gosh. We’re just watching mass behavior change happen.”
That moment crystallized a conviction Chungyalpa had been quietly building through years on the frontlines of conservation.
A Crisis Within the Climate Network
Through both her work and her upbringing, Chungypalpa understood that faith communities represented one of the most powerful and most overlooked forces in the climate change and eco-conservation movement. In 2019, she founded the Loka Initiative: a capacity-building platform at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, designed to support faith leaders and indigenous culture keepers working on environmental and climate issues.
According to research underpinning the Loka Initiative’s framework, published in the Humanistic Management Journal in 2025, 69% of global wildlife populations have declined since 1970 – the onset of what scientists now describe as the sixth mass extinction. The current rate of species extinction is 35 times higher than it would be without human activity. Six of the nine planetary boundaries necessary for Earth’s stability have now been crossed, including climate change, freshwater change and biosphere integrity.
By the time Chungyapla became the World Wildlife Fund’s US Director for the Greater Mekong region in Southeast Asia, she had – in the eyes of her community and industry – arrived. She was the youngest director at the time, and the only woman of color. By these measures, it looked like success. Internally, however, something was fracturing. “I was experiencing real anxiety and despair,” she says. “And the reason was the dissonance between knowing what is coming with climate change and with ecosystem collapse, and having no way to acknowledge that, [whether] in the work I did, or or even generally in the community and in the conservation space. I think that I was actually experiencing acute grief, but had no way to articulate that.” What she was experiencing and what she observed in colleagues across the conservation field would later be understood as eco-anxiety and climate distress.
“And I remember nobody took it seriously when I first said that,” recalls Chungyalpa. “In my case, I was really lucky. I belonged to the Karma Kagyu lineage (one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism). I am the daughter of, and the granddaughter of, Tibetan Buddhist nuns. My mother became a nun when I was quite young and so I was raised in a very actively Tibetan Buddhist environment, which meant that I was trained to meditate at a very young age. That practice really helped me address my own emotions.”
Making the Wrong Argument
The environmental movement, meanwhile, continued largely as it always had – pressing governments, lobbying corporations, publishing reports. But this was not enough to make lasting, impactful change. The problem, as Chungyalpa came to understand it, was not a shortage of data or political will. It was something more fundamental – a mismatch between the tools being used and the scale of transformation needed.
“The only tool we are usually given to have this discussion is around economic valuation,” she explains. “It’s always about coming up with the dollar estimate value of an ecosystem, of a river…and that will convince this or that corporation not to pollute there. That is the argument. And it has rarely worked for us.”
Faith Communities — a Hidden Natural Resource
What troubled Chungyalpa was the deliberate absence of one of the world’s most significant stakeholder groups from the conversation: people of faith. Approximately 84% of the global population identifies with a religious tradition. Yet the environmental movement was, for the most part, not engaging religious institutions and communities in any substantive way.
“We are so willing to work with anybody and everybody,” says Chungyalpa, “but somehow we’ve chosen to disengage with religions. And what is very clear is that religion is still incredibly influential. We, as people of faith, are the largest stakeholder group on the planet. And so, what is amazing to me, and the question I’ve ended up asking ever since then is, how come we don’t work with religions?”
When Chungyalpa began approaching faith leaders directly, she consistently heard the same response. “The most common feedback I get from religious leaders is: ‘why didn’t anyone tell me?’ It isn’t, ‘I don’t care.’ It isn’t, ‘this isn’t important.’ It is always: ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know how bad it was. I thought the government or the scientists or the NGOs are taking care of this. I didn’t know this was so bad, and there is something I can do.’”
Scientific and Spiritual Inquiry — a Path of Deep Resilience
There was no shortage of moral will. There was a shortage of information, of genuine partnership and of pathways to act. As Chungyalpa put it: “I needed to figure out a way – a safe landing place for faith leaders and scientists to work together, to meet and to work together. And that’s how the idea of the Loka Initiative was born. I wanted to be really clear that if I was going to work with faith leaders and really create a platform for them, it had to incorporate both scientific and spiritual inquiry.”
The Loka Initiative – its name drawn from the ancient Sanskrit word for ‘world’ – is built on a framework Chungyalpa and her colleagues call Deep Resilience: the recognition that inner, community and planetary wellbeing are not separate concerns but inseparable ones, and that they must be worked on together. The initiative operates in partnership with seven schools and institutes across UW-Madison’s campus, drawing on contemplative science, ecology and community practice.
The framework brings together two knowledge systems: Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings. Both carry the same foundational insight at their core: the recognition that humans are one part of an extensive web of kinship that includes the land, the water and all living beings.
In August 2023, Loka convened the Resilience in the Anthropocene (RITA) Summit, a three-day dialogue bringing together more than 40 researchers, academics, clinical psychologists and contemplative leaders, with over 1700 participants. The framework that emerged was built from that range of voices – from Indigenous elders to scientists to community experts.
The Web of Kinship in Action
Shortly after that gathering in Bodh Gaya, Chungyalpa developed environmental guidelines for Tibetan Buddhist monasteries across the Himalayas – in India, Nepal and Bhutan. What began as a personal act of faith became something far larger. Monasteries installed rooftop solar water harvesting. Some replaced ornamental gardens with vegetable plots, becoming more food self-sufficient. Nunneries organized community upcycling programs, transforming local waste into handcrafted goods. “Monasteries and nunneries were taking the knowledge they were gaining from these training conferences and then adapting it and coming up with solutions,” she recalls. “They are the ones who gave me the idea that I needed to work with religions as a project.”
The concept was born in Dharamshala, India in 2011, when Chungyalpa met UW–Madison’s Richard Davidson, director of the Center for Healthy Minds; John Dunne, distinguished chair in contemplative humanities at the center; and Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute. When Chungyalpa presented her faith-led conservation work to the Dalai Lama, she received a challenge. “He said to me: that’s all? You’re only working with the Buddhists. We’re the smallest religion on the planet. Why aren’t you working with the Hindus and the Catholics and the Christians and the Muslims?”
Widening the Web
Since then, Loka has built partnerships across a wide spectrum of faith traditions. Through a program called Crossroads, it worked with evangelical pastors across the United States on what Christian communities call ‘creation care’ – faith-rooted environmental stewardship – and on practical disaster preparedness. More than 50% of Crossroads graduates went on to launch creation care projects within their own congregations. Loka has also partnered with Catholic communities, Muslim councils and clerics in East Africa and Southeast Asia, Jewish climate coalitions, Sikh community leaders and with leaders across Hindu traditions.
Across all of these traditions, Chungyalpa has found a shared aspiration. “Whenever there is a chance for us to act in accordance with our values, it makes us feel good. It reinforces that we are living with purpose.”
A Growing Interfaith Ecosystem
Loka’s current flagship training program, Preparing Religious Environmental Plans (PREP), is a ten-week online course for faith leaders from across traditions. Participants receive grounding in environmental and climate science, the psychology of eco-anxiety and wellbeing, tools for policy engagement and training in project design. “What was incredible to me, and really powerful, was seeing their level of commitment to designing projects that would protect their communities,” Chungyalpa says, “and their level of commitment in embodying their spiritual values in a way that is really relevant to the times we’re in.”
The PREP model uses a homeroom structure, in which cohort members return to smaller, faith-specific groups led by an expert. But in person, those boundaries dissolve. “You’d think they’ll stick to their homeroom, but when they come in person, they’re all making friends all over the place, regardless of geography or faith or religion…it’s just really lovely. It reinforces how, at the end of the day, we’re all human beings.” The demand to be part of the course from faith leaders across the world demonstrates the value of this program.
Sheza Khurshid, a Muslim community organizer from Michigan who attended the PREP 2026 gathering, found that her faith and environmentalism were closely linked. “In the Quran, human beings are described as Khalifa – stewards. You don’t own the land, but you’re there to take care of it.” Sheza has organized river cleanups, created a Green Team at her mosque and teaches outdoor skills to neighborhood children. She learned that getting faith leaders on board was the turning point: “When you get your imams on board, you almost immediately see a change in the people – not just in what people were doing at the mosque, but at home.”
Through the PREP course, Khurshid learned ways to expand her small nature and environment classes for children, into local schools who approached her, getting support and feedback from the Loka faith leaders and experts. “This is such a great programme. Meeting everyone in person and meeting people from other faith traditions, and just learning from them and their experiences has been really eye-opening and I feel like I made so many adjustments to my project and widened the scope of what I was thinking, just hearing from everyone else.They kind of inspire you to think in ways you weren’t thinking initially.
“I know what Islam says about the environment, but I didn’t know about the other faith traditions. Just learning that there are so many similarities with what all the faith traditions are saying – that was very useful. Hearing from everyone made me realize that sometimes we can think a lot bigger than we are.”
In a letter Chungyalpa wrote to Loka Initiative partners, she states that she firmly believes religion is the oldest, most compelling moral framework for social action. “For too long, this idea that religion threatens science has been an Achilles heel for the environmental movement,” she says. “In my own work as a conservation scientist, I have found that framing the problem of climate change in terms of people’s own spiritual mission – their mandate for why they chose a religious life – helps me connect them to the reality of ecological devastation and the things we can do about it.
“Driven by your deep spiritual values, you can truly move mountains if you want to.”
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