For a 2,000-year-old institution hardly known for its mutability, there was a sense of urgency at the Vatican on Tuesday, when scientists, diplomats, and religious and political leaders discussed climate change and its potential impact on the world’s poor.
“We are the first generation that can end poverty, and the last generation that can avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at an international symposium on climate change organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
The event presaged a keenly anticipated papal letter on the environment that Pope Francis is expected to issue next month.
Ban met with the pope ahead of the one-day conference and told reporters afterward that the pope’s message in his scheduled papal teaching, known as an encyclical, would come at “a critical time,” one that “demanded a collective action.”
“Climate change is approaching much faster than one may think,” he said.
In September, the pope is scheduled to address the US Congress, as well as a UN summit meeting on sustainable development, where he is expected to reiterate his environmental message.
The pope has said that climate change is “mostly” a result of human activity.
“I count on his moral voice, his moral leadership,” said Ban, who is leading efforts to come to an agreement on limiting activities said to contribute to global warming, which are to be discussed at a summit in Paris in December.
Representatives of different religions spoke at the symposium, and a statement approved on Tuesday afternoon by the participants underscored their common environmental concerns.
“Let the world know that there is no divide whatsoever between religion and science on the issue of climate change,” Ban said.
Some critics opposed to restrictions on greenhouse gases have expressed concerns that the pope’s encyclical could confuse “people into thinking that climate change issues are now an article of faith, part of the Roman Catholic doctrine,” said Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot, a Web site that largely denies human activity is to blame for climate change.
Morano is part of a delegation of “climate skeptics” led by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, that traveled to Rome to challenge the symposium’s findings.
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