By The 31st annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31), is taking place in Antalya, Turkey, Nov. 9–20.
As world leaders prepare to gather this week for the 31st annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Antalya, Turkey, the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) issued a statement calling on world leaders to actively work to protect life on our common home.
The annual conference takes place in November or December and this year takes place from Nov. 9–20.
The statement was issued by Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Bishop A. Elias Zaidan, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, along with President and CEO of Catholic Relief Services Sean Callahan.
“As leaders gather at COP31, we recognize the need for decisive action that will protect and promote human flourishing and our common home. The global Church continues to witness the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” they wrote. “We accompany those most impacted by a changing climate and the resulting extreme weather, rising seas, and biodiversity loss.”
They pointed out that young people in particular “are leading this response, demanding climate justice for their generation and generations to come,” adding that “their witness is our hope: proof that our faith in action answers the hardest realities.”
The Catholic leaders recalled Pope Leo XIV’s message shared during last year’s conference in which he said that God’s creation is “crying out in floods, droughts, storms, and relentless heat.”
“He also reminded us that it is not the Paris Agreement that is failing, but our collective response to it — and that to overlook communities most exposed to climate change is to deny our shared humanity,” the statement said.
“We urge world leaders and institutions to deliver additional climate finance that prioritizes grants over loans so that poor countries can invest in resilience and adaptation without the weight of more debt,” the statement said. “We implore negotiators to agree on how progress on adaptation will be measured within the Global Goal on Adaptation. We call on them to finalize a ‘just transition’ mechanism to accompany developing countries with expertise, cooperation, and funding as they move away from fossil fuels.”
“This transition should center on protecting the dignity of every worker, family, and community affected.”
The statement concluded: “Echoing the call of our Holy Father, we ask leaders to leave Antalya having matched the scale of their commitments to the scale of the need — and to remember, in every negotiating room, that behind every number is a family making difficult, daily decisions on survival amidst more extreme, erratic, and frequent climate shocks.”
The Irish Bishops’ Conference also issued a statement last week urging the Irish delegation attending the COP31 to recognize the “important role” Ireland plays in “safeguarding our common home.”
The Irish bishops urged the country’s delegation to advocate for four specific topics: climate finance and social justice, clean energy investment and sufficiency, fossil fuel phase-out, and fossil fuel profit tax.
The COP31 is expected to draw roughly 100,000 participants including heads of states, heads of governments, prime ministers, vice presidents, climate ministers, negotiators, scientists, corporate executives, and nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace and WWF.
The conference is being led by COP31 president and Turkey’s Environment Minister Murat Kurum. Australian Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen is presiding over negotiations, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opened the summit.
This is the second consecutive year that the United States lacks an official government delegation at the summit due to the Trump administration’s withdrawal from climate pacts. However, some U.S. governors, lawmakers, and business leaders will be in attendance independently.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
How about those fellows urge world leaders to curb the leaching of contraceptive chemicals into the waterways?
The bishops ought to be embarrassed.
They look like fools, shilling for the utterly discredited climate grifters.
The obvious fact is, climate stability is a joke. The Earth’s climate has never been stable.
Ever.
Think about it.
To stabilize the climate, we would have to:
1. Force the sun to maintain a constant energy output
2. Stop the solar system from moving through the Milky Way galaxy
3. Stop the Earth’s orbit from changing
4. Stop the variation of the Earth’s tilt on its axis
5. Stop the Earth from wobbling on its rotational axis
6. Stop nearby stars from going supernova
7. Stop the ocean currents from changing
8. Control the reflectivity of snow and ice
9. Regulate the evaporation of water from the oceans
10. Stop the molten core of the Earth from varying its rotation
Oh, yeah. It all makes perfect sense.
But, but brineyman, the bishops can do the impossible if you just write a check and secure some government funding.
For the scientifically curious, the key word in the USCCB statement is “ADAPTATION,” not politicized finger-pointing at smokestacks of a leftist Green Agenda, or denial of natural causes. Instead, and about ecological indicators–as in soccer, even yellow cards matter.
Beyond knee-jerk reactionism, some possible talking points:
FIRST, scientifically, in our natural and compact world, what are the boundary conditions, tipping points, and other kinds of limits? Theologically, God is infinite, but Nature is not. With the configuration of world crises now exceeding the impact of historical industrialization on society (Rerum Novarum), the perennial Catholic Church now must defend the human person against not only the direct ideological dead ends of Marxism and myopic versions of capitalism, but also the indirect dangers to regional populations from long-term ecological sinkholes of probably many sorts and sizes.
About the “environment” or the natural science of ecology, yours truly has settled on three propositions: conceptual clarity; the incomplete sciences; and cultural/systemic interactions and (given the uncertainties) the need for foresight and timely “prudential judgment”—a moral principle of Catholic Social Teaching.
SECOND, about clarity, St. John Paul II acknowledged the ecology of natural science, however incomplete, but also distinguished this “natural ecology” from the distinct but interrelated “human ecology”.
The first applies to such significant details as tipping points (the Buffalo hunter ethic, the Dust Bowl event) and feedback loops (thawing of permafrost and release of millions of years of methane); and the latter based on “moral theology” (the family, the common good, etc.). Laudato Si proposes an educational but somewhat conflated “integral ecology” which to critics kowtows to politicized science, and implies a blurred new world ethic where consequences and proportionalism might override moral absolutes (as articulated in Veritatis Splendor), and where Solidarity overrides Subsidiarity. So, maybe a work in progress…
THIRD, about disdain by some for such indicators as the metric average 1.5 degrees global temperature change, and about the much longer oscillating climate record of world history and, yes, about the deficiencies of simplistically modeled climate projections…
One key deficiency of the modeling seems to be that attention is limited to the First Law of Thermodynamics, at the expense of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That is, first, that energy cannot be created or destroyed (therefore, atmospheric heat entrapment and the rising temperature since industrialization) and, second, that the entropy of the universe or our closed system also increases. So, under the second law, instead of heat entrapment, what we also might get is global weather turbulence in the form larger and more droughts and multiple tornadoes. Hint: the Dustbowl happened…
FOURTH, from the Church’s perspective, the case can be less limited to the “science (?)” of ecological Armageddon, and more about the “prudential judgment” of adaptive actions, and possible mitigation as an alternative to de facto triage—given the long lead time it takes to get anything done or undone.
Yes, the rushed Laudato Si could have said more about positive matters such as the public-private and international work of the Nature Conservancy, and the sometimes corporate “third bottom line.” Unmentioned preventive actions already include land set-asides and forest restoration. Adaptive actions already include construction—at the cost of billions of dollars—of massive sea walls in the Netherlands and in Venice where the sea levels are in fact rising. Not hysterical fiction, many regions need much better management of water—as a scarce resource. How to adjust to prolonged droughts and glacial disappearance, with the replacement of snowpack runoff by trapped rain runoff? Also nonfiction, the mining of non-replenished groundwater is a ticking clock, as in Beijing with its population of 22 million. And then, of course, wildfires.
FIFTH, ecological problems call for ingenuity and more, more scientific and conscientious curiosity rather than catcalls… About which, in Centesimus Annus (1991), St. John Paul II defended property ownership (as under Rerum Novarum, 1891), but newly affirmed: “In our time, in particular, there exists another form of ownership which is becoming no less important than land: THE POSSESSION OF KNOW-HOW, TECHNOLOGY AND SKILL [italics]” (n. 32). But he also goes on to suggest much else, including but not limited to, “…a change of lifestyles, or models of production and consumption, and of the established structures of power which today govern societies” (n. 58).
The U.S. Catholic bishops ought to stick to theology. Worldly matter are the purview of the laity.
The U.S. Catholic bishops ought to stick to theology. Worldly matters are the purview of the laity.
Can I say “idiots”?