CFR Update: Pope Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change

June 18, 2015 Daily News Brief

TOP OF THE AGENDA Pope Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change Pope Francis released a nearly two hundred-page encyclical on the environment (NYT), calling for changes to politics, economics, and lifestyles in order to prevent unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem. The pontiff also called for the replacement (BBC) of fossil fuels without delay and called on industrialized nations to help developing countries confront (Guardian) the global environmental crisis. This is the first papal encyclical dedicated to the topic of climate change and comes ahead of the pope's visit to the United Nations in September and a series of international summits seeking to negotiate a global treaty on climate change.

ANALYSIS "Francis has made environmental issues a priority of his papacy. This is the first encyclical that is fully his, and the Catholic Church's first-ever dedicated entirely to this topic. The pope is offering the world a moral vocabulary for talking about climate change, shifting global attention from the macro solutions of policy summits to the personal ethics of environmental stewardship," writes Emma Green in the Atlantic. "By throwing his personal authority behind the global effort to mitigate climate change, the pope has made a significant intervention in world affairs. From the secular world's perspective, this is probably the most important step he has made during his two-year papacy," writes the Economist. "The encyclical is not a checklist of how to save the planet and, in so doing, each other. Instead, Laudato Si' is a call to renewed, ecological humanism and moral vision in a world beset by technological and economic temptation," writes Christiana Z. Peppard in the Washington Post.