When Pope Francis becomes the first pontiff to address a joint session of Congress this week, much focus will be on how Republicans will respond to the pope’s position on the climate. If Francis presses his case that the world must take urgent action to combat climate change, you can expect cameras to find Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose office recently indicated it is doubling down on efforts to fight President Barack Obama’s new greenhouse-gas reductions.
But this domestic political drama, absorbing in its own right, may obscure a more important, even radical, shift in the global politics of climate change that Francis has helped to advance. In his June encyclical addressing the issue, he emphasized the fundamental environmental rights of the world’s impoverished, and suggested the rich who have benefited from fossil fuels have a moral obligation to help the poor who may suffer most from climate change. “The poor and the Earth are shouting,” the pope wrote.
This emphasis on the fate of the poor seems like an understandable moral position in keeping with Francis’ broader emphasis on poverty and inequality. But it also draws attention to one of the biggest practical hurdles currently standing in the way of the U.N. climate agreement being negotiated later this year in Paris.
For the complete article, please see Politico.
French environment minister Nicolas Hulot has resigned live on national radio in a surprise move that will come as a blow to president Emmanuel Macron’s green credentials. Nicolas Hulot had not made the French president aware of his decision to quit, he told radio presenters, adding his time in office had been an ‘accumulation of disappointments’.
Liberia’s largest palm oil producer, Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) pulls out of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) – how can rural communities cope with the impacts? The forests near GVL’s Liberian plantations are not only sacred sites of the region's people but also heavily populated with chimpanzees, leopards, pygmy hippopotamus and forest elephants which are significant not only to the local ecosystem but globally.
Mine closures have caused social and political turmoil in many regions, for example in South Africa. But there are ways of planning and managing the phase-out so that when the inevitable happens, people are better prepared. A new study looks at opportunities beyond mining and finds that infrastructure that supports mining can also be put to new use.
Population pressure, a lack of economic opportunities, environmental degradation, and new forms of travel are contributing to human displacement and unsafe migration on an unprecedented scale. And as millions more people see climate change erode their livelihoods, the problem will get worse in the absence of visionary global leadership.