AFDC started to deal with issues related to faith and conservation when faced with a major challenge of declaring the religiously (Maronite) owned forest landscape of Harissa (North of Beirut) as a protected area back in 1999. Despite the very positive support from the Maronite Patriarch to do so, the concept of declaring the site as a protected area while having the Ministry of Environment as the site legal manager was totally rejected by the church.

AFDC sought the help of the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF and the Alliance for Religions and Conservation ARC. Both organizations responded quickly. 

“Every religion believes that the gift of life itself is sacred: we do not own it, but we have responsibility to care for it. It was this shared understanding that led WWF and ARC Alliance of Religions and Conservation to create a special term of praise and recognition for major significant new projects launched by the World’s religions in 2000. “Sacred Gifts for a Living Planet” highlights both the theology and the practice of caring for the environment which every single major religion now advocates and undertakes.“ ARC home page

 WWF collaborated on this initiative through participating in a study that identified 13 important forest areas in Lebanon. Two of these areas were chosen to be as hotspots: Harissa Forest (owned by the Maronite Church) and the Damour-Dmit forest.

ARC supported AFDC in the first site, and several meetings were organized with the Maronite Patriarch. As a result, in 2000 the Church made the unprecedented move of issuing a public pledge to preserve its forest declaring Harissa forest as a “Sacred Gift to the Earth”. Based on that, the Maronite Patriarch has formed a committee to manage Harissa forest composed of representatives of the local community, AFDC and the church and chaired by Msgr. Camille Zaidan.

It was this approach that led the Maronite church to formally declare Qadisha valley (in the North of Lebanon) as a Maronite protected environment in 2003. The site has been already a world heritage site as declared by UNESCO.

While introducing the concept of “Sacred Gifts to the Earth”, AFDC launched a conservation campaign together with the Maronite Diocese of Antelias. This campaign has resulted in declaring one of the religious feasts, St. Maron John, that is on March 10 as a day for environmental preaching. Together with AFDC, the diocese inaugurated the first eco religious lodge in Lebanon: Mar Gerges Monastery in Bherdok, North Maten.

In September 25, 2003, AFDC organized a national workshop with the National Islamic Christian Dialogue Committee about Faith and Conservation. The workshop that was supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation brought together representatives of major religious groups in Lebanon and each of them presented how conservation issues were reflected in the theology itself. The presentations during this workshop and a summary of the workshop recommendations were printed in Arabic and the document is available at AFDC.