Motions calling for urgent action to address climate change will be at the heart of the next sessions of the Church of England General Synod, which meets five months before a landmark international summit in Paris.

The meeting, from 10 to 13 July in York, will be the last for the current membership. Elections for the next quinquennium take place in the autumn.

In York the synod will be asked not only to urge governments to tackle global warming, but to put the Church's own house in order.

"The environment theme is a big one for obvious reasons," the General Secretary of the synod, William Fittall, said at a press conference about the agenda on Friday.

He referred to summit in Paris in December at which 196 countries will meet to sign a new climate-change agreement. He also mentioned the recent reform of the Church's own investment policies.

Asked to contrast the synod's response to climate change and the encyclical published by the Vatican last week, Mr Fittall said "you would struggle to put a cigarette paper between [them]".

On Monday 13 July, a motion entitled "Combating Climate Change: the Paris Summit and the Mission of the Church" will be moved by the Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Rev Nicholas Holtham, who chairs the Environment Working Group.

It urges governments to agree "long-term pathways to a low-carbon future" and calls on the synod to endorse the World Bank's call for ending fossil-fuel subsidies.

The motion also seeks to implement some of the proposals made by the Bishops' Climate Change Network convened by the Archbishop of Cape Town earlier this year, including the development of new "ecotheological resources", and a fast at the beginning of each month "for climate justice".

The second motion, moved in the afternoon by the Bishop of Manchester, Dr David Walker, relates to climate change and investment policy.

It affirms the national investment bodies' disinvestment from thermal coal or the production of oil from tar sands, and calls on them to "engage robustly with companies and policy-makers on the need to act to support the transition to a low-carbon economy, and where necessary, use the threat of disinvestment from companies as a key lever for change."

Before the two debates, the synod will spend an hour-and-a-half doing group work on the environment.