In his first significant address on climate change, Pope Leo called on Catholics and citizens of the world on Wednesday to carry on the environmental advocacy of his predecessor, Francis, and not to treat it as a “divisive” issue.
Leo spoke at the opening ceremony of a climate conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document on the urgent need to protect the health of the planet. “The challenges identified in Laudato Si are in fact even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago,” he said.
Speaking for just over 10 minutes in an auditorium where he shared a stage with the actor and former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Brazil’s climate minister, on the grounds of the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, about 17 miles southeast of the Vatican, Leo focused on the action that individuals and local communities can take to alleviate increasing climate pressure.
“Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls,” he said. “Citizens need to take an active role in political decision making at national, regional and local levels. Only then will it be possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.”
Wednesday’s speech showed that the new pope is committed to keeping the issue of climate change at the heart of public dialogue.
Leo, who was elected in May as the first pope from the United States, has remained measured on many potentially controversial issues, and his most forceful comments on Wednesday were references to the words of Francis. “What must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, that they be seen and felt as divisive issues?” he said, echoing some of Francis’ most famous phrases.
Speaking a little over a week after President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that climate change was the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” the pope refrained from critiquing any national leader or policy.
But in his address on Wednesday, Pope Leo made reference to Francis’ 2023 update to Laudato Si, which “noted that ‘some have chosen to deride’ the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’ and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.”
Pope Francis framed climate change as a spiritual issue for the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion followers, and warned that the poor shouldered the greatest ravages of global warming.
Last month, when Leo inaugurated a new rite for Mass to “ask God for the ability to care for creation,” he spoke of the “injustice, violations of international law and the rights of peoples, grave inequalities and the greed that fuels them are spawning deforestation, pollution and the loss of biodiversity.”
Whether the pope’s pulpit can influence climate action remains to be seen. In 2015, at least 10 world leaders invoked Pope Francis when they spoke at the United Nations climate gathering that led to the landmark Paris Agreement, in which the world’s nations pledged to work toward limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages. Francis also tried to insert himself into national politics, as when he first met Mr. Trump in 2017 and gave him a copy of Laudato Si, urging the president not to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord. Mr. Trump did so anyway.
Francis himself acknowledged his frustration that his lobbying did not yield more robust action. In the 2023 update to Laudato Si, he lamented the slow progress in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since he released his original essay.
Now, as world leaders and climate activists prepare for the 30th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, to be held in Brazil next month, there are sobering signs that the world continues to warm, leading to devastating effects for millions of people. Speaking before the pope, Marina Silva, Brazil’s minister of the environment and climate change, said that commitments made in the Paris Agreement “haven’t been fulfilled and haven’t been complied with despite the compelling claims of science.”
She added, “What we need now is the ethical determination to fulfill these commitments for the benefit of this present time and future generations, with special attention to the most vulnerable and marginalized.”
According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2024 was the warmest year in its 175 years of record keeping, and extreme weather events that year led to the highest number of displaced people annually since 2008.
In the United States, Mr. Trump has closed laboratories that research the ways a warming planet is changing weather and halted renewable energy projects. Countries including China, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia have increased coal power production since 2020. Only one-third of the signers of the Paris Agreement have submitted updated climate pledges.
The polarized geopolitical landscape makes cooperation on climate action difficult, said Cardinal Michael Czerny, who was one of Francis’ closest collaborators on the environment and remains head of the Vatican ministry that addresses climate issues.
“It’s very, very hard to see, with multilateralism in tatters, how you can face other issues which, while they have local or regional roots and local and regional consequences, nevertheless are the case throughout the world,” Cardinal Czerny said in an interview Wednesday morning at the Vatican. “I think our capacity to cooperate is deteriorating rapidly.”
He said he worried that the coming United Nations conference might be little more than a “charade.”
Despite signs of backsliding, activists and some climate scientists are hopeful that the moral guidance of the pope might help.
“We’re not going to solve the problem instantly of course,” said Piers Forster, former chairman of a climate advisory board to the government of Britain and a professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds in England. “Every little step and every little statement by someone as important as Pope Leo can clearly begin to move populations and countries in the right direction.”
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Rome and Castel Gandolfo.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
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