In the new Exhortation, Laudate Deum (Praise God), Pope Francis said that some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible.
He added that we are barely in time to avoid even more terrible damage and also criticised climate-change deniers.
“It is no longer possible to doubt the human - ‘anthropic’ - origin of climate change,” the pope said.
“The concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere … was stable until the 19th century...
“In the past 50 years, this increase has accelerated significantly.”
He said he felt obliged “to make these clarifications, which may appear obvious, because of certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church”.
Francis said that he has realised “that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point”.
“It is indubitable that the impact of climate change will increasingly prejudice the lives and families of many people.”
He stressed that the climate crisis is also a justice crisis.
“The effects of climate change are borne by the most vulnerable people, whether at home or around the world,” he said.
“A low, richer percentage of the planet contaminates more than the poorest 50 per cent of the total world population... per capita emissions of the richer countries are much greater than those of the poorer ones.
“How can we forget that Africa, home to more than half of the world’s poorest people, is responsible for a minimal portion of historic emissions?”
Francis also complained that “the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time”.
Referring to the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, the pope stressed that “everything is connected and no one is saved alone”.
ANSA
