Pope Francis urged attendees of the next COP28 climate meetings to accept binding regulations on the phase-out of fossil fuels on Wednesday, warning that the world “is collapsing” as a result of global warming.
The 86-year-old pontiff wrote a follow-up eight years after his seminal thesis described the destruction caused by human-caused climate change and cautioned that some damage was “already irreversible”.
“With the passage of time, I have realised that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” he wrote in the 12-page letter.
But he said the next round of UN climate talks opening in Dubai on November 30 “can represent a change of direction”, if participants make binding agreements on moving from fossil fuels to clean energy sources such as wind and solar.
Only a real commitment to change “can enable international politics to recover its credibility”, he wrote.
The pope, as well as the entire Catholic Church, forcefully backed the scientific theory that human behavior is to blame for climate change in his 2015 encyclical.
But he acknowledged Wednesday that there were still those, including inside the Church, who had “certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions”.
“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativise the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” wrote Francis.
