ROME — Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin addressed the U.N. COP27 climate summit Tuesday, urging net-zero emissions and warning climate change “will not wait for us.”
Speaking for Pope Francis, Cardinal Parolin told the dignitaries gathered in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El-Skeikh that the Holy See is fully committed to the goal of net-zero emissions and is “intensifying its efforts to improve its environmental management.”
The only way to overcome the climate emergency, the cardinal contended, is to combine political, technical, and operational measures with the promotion of “new lifestyles.”
“The socio-ecological crisis that we are living is a propitious moment for individual and collective conversion and for concrete decisions that can no longer be postponed,” he declared. “The human face of the climate emergency challenges us deeply.”
“We have a moral duty to act concretely in order to prevent and respond to the always more frequent and severe humanitarian impacts caused by climate change,” he insisted, while underscoring the “growing phenomenon of migrants being displaced” by climate change.
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen chats with Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See , at the Sharm El-Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit (SCIS) of the UNFCCC COP27 climate conference on November 08, 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (Sean Gallup/Getty)
Other global crises such as the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine risk “overshadowing our efforts here in Sharm el-Sheikh,” he said, echoing U.N. secretary general António Guterres, who said Monday that climate change is more important than other global issues because it is “is on a different timeline and a different scale” and is “the defining issue of our age.”
“We cannot allow for this to happen,” Cardinal Parolin said. “Climate change will not wait for us.”
The wounds inflicted on our human family by the phenomenon of climate change are comparable to those resulting from a global conflict, the cardinal stated, and thus our political will “should be guided by the awareness that either we win together or we lose together.”
We have “less and less time available to correct course,” Parolin said, adopting the alarmist tone running through the entire COP27 conference.
“We should also not neglect the non-economic side of loss and damage, like loss of heritage and cultures. Here we have a lot to learn from indigenous peoples,” he added.
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