CLIMATE CHANGE-SUMMIT/VATICAN-POPE Pope urges UN to take strong action on climate change

Record ID: 146437

  • Title: CLIMATE CHANGE-SUMMIT/VATICAN-POPE Pope urges UN to take strong action on climate change
  • Date: 21st July 2015
  • Summary: VATICAN (JULY 21, 2015) (REUTERS) ***WARNING CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS WAITING FOR POPE FRANCIS POPE FRANCIS ARRIVING IN CONFERENCE ROOM PHOTOGRAPHERS TAKING PHOTOS VARIOUS OF POPE FRANCIS GREETING DELEGATES ON PLATFORM POPE FRANCIS SITTING DOWN ON PLATFORM PHOTOGRAPHERS (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) POPE FRANCIS SAYING: "We must get the United Nations
  • Embargoed: 5th August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA12K6Q1NE4239A481WC1N4583P
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Pope Francis addressed mayors and governors from major world cities on Tuesday (July 21) at a Vatican summit whose aim was to urge global leaders to take bold action at this year's U.N. climate change summit, saying it may be the last chance to tackle human-induced global warming.
    The pope was given a warm welcome by the participants from South America, Africa, the United States, Europe and Asia.
    It is the Vatican's latest attempt to influence a United Nations summit in Paris in November aiming for a global deal to combat climate change after past failures.
    Francis, speaking in unprepared comments in Spanish to the group at the end of the first day, urged the United Nations to take an interest in the issue.
    "I have a great hope for the Paris summit in November that a fundamental agreement is reached," the pontiff said. "I have a great hope, but undoubtedly the United Nations needs to take a very strong stand on this phenomenon. Most of all in the trafficking of human beings caused by the environmental phenomenon, the exploitation of people."
    The conference linked climate change and modern slavery because, according to an introductory paper, "global warming is one of the causes of poverty and forced migration".
    The pope invited some 65 local and regional leaders to attend the two-day conference on how cities can address what the Vatican calls the "interconnected emergencies" of climate change and human trafficking, and he explained to the audience why they'd been invited - and how the message needed to be taken up by the grass-roots of their communities.
    "And why has the Pontifical Academy of Science summoned mayors and local administrators? Because even this conscience spreads from the centre towards the periphery, the most serious and deeper work is done from the periphery to the centre meaning, from you to the conscience of humanity. The Holy See or this or that other country can make a nice speech at the United Nations but if the real work doesn't come from the periphery towards the centre, it will have no effect. There lies the responsibility of the mayors and urban local governments. And I thank you very much to have come to this meeting as peripheries," Francis said.
    "I thank you all and I ask the Lord, that he may give us the grace to be able to gain awareness of this problem of destruction that we ourselves are responsible for, with our lack of care for the human ecology and not having an ecological conscience like the one that was given to us in the beginning," the Pope concluded before signing a declaration stating that the Paris summit "may be the last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2 degrees centigrade."
    Leaders should come to a "bold agreement that confines global warming to a limit safe for humanity while protecting the poor and the vulnerable...," the declaration, which all the mayors also signed, reads.
    High-income countries should help finance the cost of climate change mitigation in low-income countries, it says.
    In a direct rejection of so-called climate change deniers, the declaration says: "Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its effective control is a moral imperative for humanity."
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