Leaders of the Catholic Church, which has 1.2 billion followers, have urged governments around the world to ramp up their climate action efforts on Friday (26 October), calling for “ambitious implementation” of the Paris Agreement.
In a joint appeal, the presidents of the Catholic continental bishops’ conference, which represents church leaders from five continents, insisted that the international community has a “moral duty” to meet the targets of the United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement on climate Change.
According to the appeal, launched in Rome, the six presidents said that the upcoming UN climate change summit in Poland this December should act as a “milestone on the path set out in 2015 in Paris”.
The European Union news website EurActiv reports In a sub-section of the appeal called “1.5°C to stay alive”, the bishops highlighted that “the effects of climate change are not evenly distributed” and warned that “many millions of migrants will follow” because of its impact.
It comes off the back of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report on the effects of global warming, which warned that a so-called two degree Celsius world would be more affected than previously thought.
The bishop’s statement is of particular note given the COP24 summit and the G20 summit in November in Buenos Aires, the first held in South America, will be hosted by Catholic-majority countries.
It is not the first time the bishops’ conference or the wider Catholic Church has intervened in climate change matters, as it issued a similar call to the faithful ahead of COP21 in 2015.
In the same year, Pope Francis published his second encyclical entitled Laudato si, which focused on “care for our common home”. In the landmark publication, the pontiff took aim at environmental degradation and global warming.
In the latest appeal, the archbishops of Genoa, Mumbai, Bogota, Suva, Luxembourg and Lubango said that the world needed to “rethink” the agricultural sector, undergo a “financial paradigm shift” and move more quickly to reliance on renewable energy sources.
They also added “we must resist the temptation to look for solutions to our current situation in short-term technological fixes without addressing the root causes and the long-term consequences”.
Earlier this year, Caritas Internationalis and a group of Catholic banks worth around €7.5 billion announced that they would pull their investments out of polluting energy sources.
