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.
The impact of climate change is posing a growing threat to peace and security. Germany is therefore putting climate and security on the Security Council’s agenda.
Russia’s economic development minister warned last week that the EU’s plans to deploy a carbon tax at the bloc’s borders will not be in line with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, just as Brussels doubled down on the idea of green tariffs.
Few places have suffered more from the COVID-19 pandemic than southern China, the region where the novel coronavirus was first detected in the city of Wuhan. But it turned out that the pandemic is not the only calamity to befall south China this year. The region has been inundated by heavy rainfall since late May, creating a risk of catastrophic flooding.
Natural resources-based conflicts are sometimes made complex by non-climate push and pull factors, like unemployment and political tension. These factors should be taken into account when developing and implementing a peacebuilding strategy, making sure all stakeholders are at the table – including those fueling the conflict. The online workshop ‘Integrating peacebuilding and climate change mitigation efforts in natural resource management’, organised by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) and adelphi, looked into this complex issue.