Well, climate change is once again back on the agenda with the UK hosting COP26, a 13-day climate change summit where world leaders are expected to commit to an ambitious plan to lower their emissions.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison will be attending with Australia - where I'm writing from - having already committed to achieving net emissions by 2050.

Interestingly enough this plan was criticised by Britain's top climate adviser who suggested it lacked "any proper programmes".

And scepticism has been expressed by climate activist Greta Thunberg who told the Guardian in September, "Nothing has changed from previous years really. The leaders will say 'we'll do this and we will put our forces together and achieve this' and then they will do nothing. Maybe some symbolic things and creative accounting and things that don't really have a big impact. We can have as many COPs as we want but nothing real will come out of it."

Secretary General of the UN Antonio Guterres has shared similar fears "that there is a serious risk that COP26 will not deliver."

The sad reality is that all these critics are correct because the fact is you can't hope to change society without first changing its people.

Which is why you can, as Thunberg pointed out, have a COP conference every year and nothing will get done.

Why? Because it has to be individuals that drive this change, not world leaders. And that's because world leaders are ultimately accountable to their electorate.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd went to the electorate in 2007 saying that climate change was "Australia's great moral challenge". He won a landslide victory giving him a mandate to take action and he proposed an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that achieved bipartisan support. Unfortunately, after years of bitter divisions over the scheme, it eventually faltered.

Driven by politics and self-interest, any attempt to change society will not be successful so long as we don't see changed individuals.

A global issue such as climate change requires a global collective movement but how can a collective movement gather any momentum if individuals remain unchanged.

That is why our values must not decline.

If we read Genesis, we learn that as humans our responsibility is to take care of the things that God has given us. In other words, it is to control what we can control.

We see that in the story of Adam and Eve, and in Genesis 2:15 when they were placed in the garden to "work and take care of it".

Our role as Christians is to steward God's creation - to care for, manage, oversee and protect all that God owns and has created, including the people and the earth.

So why as a society are we moving away from that?

In 1901, 96.1% of people identified as Christian in Australia according to census data.

In the last census results to be made public in 2016, only 52.1 per cent of people identified as Christian and that number is projected to fall below 50 per cent once the 2021 data is published.

There is no doubt therefore that Christian values will be on the decline too and we are already seeing an increasingly hostile climate for Christians.

Christian politicians are frequently vilified in the media here, often being described as "extreme" or from the "religious right".

In the state of Victoria there is no longer any religious education in public schools, with the Safe Schools programme growing across Australia despite the founder Roz Ward admitting publicly in 2016 the programme was never about anti-bullying but about neo-Marxist indoctrination around gender and sexuality.

But it's not just the biblical understanding of gender and sexuality that is on the decline; other values, like caring for the environment, all stand to be affected.

And that to me is a far bigger threat than climate change because sustainable and meaningful action will only occur if people on an individual level understand their role as a carer and a protector of God's earth.

Christian values, ultimately, are about denying yourself and laying your life down for your brother.

Jesus modelled that on the cross and until we model that in our own lives society is only going to do what is right for themselves and not for their neighbour.

Ben Kruzins is a Pastor of The Hub Baptist Church in regional New South Wales, Australia. He has written for The Canberra Times and The Sydney Morning Herald.