Climate summit is ‘humanity’s last chance’

The world is facing a “now or never” moment to tackle climate change, Pope Francis said on his flight back to Rome from Africa ahead of a United Nations conference on the topic in Paris.

“We are on the verge of suicide, to use a strong word, and I am certain that people in Paris are aware of this and want to do something about it,” the Pope said. “The other day I read that in Greenland, glaciers are losing mass at a rate of billions of tons. I trust these people will do something. I hope this will be the case and I pray it will.”

In a speech to the UN office in Nairobi last Thursday, Francis said it would be a catastrophe if world leaders did not face up to the need to protect the environment.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, reiterated the Pope’s calls when he addressed the summit, known as COP21, which takes place between 30 November and 11 December.

Delivering a speech on behalf of the Pope, he said there must be a “transformative and global” agreement based on “solidarity, justice, equality, participation”.

Cardinal Parolin said Francis would like to see an agreement that would “lessen the effects of climate change, fight against poverty, and enable the dignity of all human beings”.

Pope Francis and the Holy See have made strenuous efforts to try to influence the international community to come to an agreement in Paris. His encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’, was released in May this year and he addressed the UN headquarters on the issues in September.

“On account of the special attention Pope Francis and Laudato si’ have attracted, the Catholic Church is now almost spearheading the movement for climate change,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the president of the German bishops’ conference, told domradio.de.

Laudato si’ had made conservation of the planet “obligatory”, Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin said at a debate in which 300 church and political representatives took part on their way to Paris in a special train.

Last week on the eve of the conference, 570,000 people in more than 100 countries marched to demand action on climate change. Cardinal Peter Turkson, the Pope’s closest adviser on ecology, urged Catholics to join the marches, saying people should exercise their “ecological citizenship”.

Interfaith leaders gathered in Saint-Denis in Paris on 28 November to hand in a petition with more than 1.8 million signatures – 800,000 collected by Catholic organisations. At the event, Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, president of the Pan-Amazonian Church Network, said: “We ask for drastic cuts of carbon emissions to keep the global temperature rise below the dangerous threshold of 1.5°C … we need to put an end to the fossil fuel era and aim for complete decarbonisation by 2050.” He added that wealthier countries should help the poorest by providing “robust climate finance”.