Pope Francis urged “sustainable and integral development” to protect the world’s most vulnerable at the outset of a landmark visit to the United States on Wednesday.
The Latin American pontiff, who issued an unprecedented pastoral message to Catholics to conserve the planet in June, repeated the call on a sunlit morning in Washington DC aside President Barack Obama.
His first visit to the US, Pope Francis said climate change was a “problem that can no longer be left to a future generation” and welcomed Obama’s leadership to cut greenhouse gas emissions in August’s clean power plan.
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Read the speech Pope Francis gave at the White House here.
As we step into 2020, time has come to implement the Paris Agreement and raise climate ambition, but the geopolitical tide seems to be against it. The best way forward at this crucial juncture might be to forge a ‘climate coalition of the willing’ – recognising and streamlining actions of all actors at all levels.
For the first time in the survey’s 10-year outlook, the top five global risks in terms of likelihood are all environmental. They are: extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, major natural disasters, major biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and human-made environmental damage and disasters.
Millions of people across Sub-Saharan Africa could face grave hunger in the first half of 2020 because of armed conflict, political instability and climate change-linked disasters, a report says.
The report published by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) this month says that the countries affected will require life-saving food assistance and investment to prevent humanitarian catastrophes.
Australia is currently experiencing one of its worst bushfire seasons, with swathes of the southern and eastern coastal regions having been ablaze for weeks. As the fires have spread, there has been extensive media coverage both nationally and internationally documenting – and debating – their impacts. This Carbon Brief overview summarises how the fires – and the political response to them – have been covered by the media.