Commit to sustainable development, fight global warming, Vatican tells U.N.
June 11th, 2006 by sfuqua
"The international community must commit to sustainable resource
management policies that place the needs of the human family and protection
of the environment above commercial and industrial concerns, the
Vatican's representative to the United Nations told a May 11 session of
the U.N. Economic and Social Council’s Commission on Sustainable
Development."
5/15/2006
Catholic Online
UNITED NATIONS (Catholic Online) – The international community must
commit to sustainable resource management policies that place the needs of
the human family and protection of the environment above commercial and
industrial concerns, the Vatican's representative to the United Nations
told a May 11 session of the U.N. Economic and Social Council’s
Commission on Sustainable Development here.
Progress toward global sustainable development pales in comparison to
“a sobering picture” of the world’s environment, said
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the permanent observer of the Holy See to the
international body.
“Essential improvement in living standards for all, while assuring
our world’s environmental future,” he said, will only occur if
there is an integrated international environmental and developmental policy
coupled with “committed political follow through.”
In his remarks, Archbishop Migliore also pointed “the serious
destruction of the human environment,” the diminishing of water
resources, food security, global warming and renewal energy.
He said that, while many are “rightly worried” about the
“irrational destruction of the natural environment,” too little
attention is focused on protecting “the moral conditions for an
authentic human ecology.”
The human person, the archbishop said, should be at “the center of
environmental concerns” in the affairs of nations, corporations and
individuals, while there is a simultaneous promotion of the urgency of
“human responsibility for the Earth.”
“As the essential symbiosis of life on the planet becomes
plain,” he said, “there is already a growing acknowledgement that
good environmental policies are by extension good people policies,
too.”
He pointed to the critical importance of water in the effort of building
sustainable development and the dire predictions for the global community in
access to that resource.
“This is already a humanitarian and environmental crisis, as well as
a question of social justice, Archbishop Migliore said, noting that 34,000
people die every day due to a lack of clean water and that 1.5 billion people
lack such access today, a figure that may double by 2025.
“Within 20 years, the reserves of water per person will be a third
of what they were in 1950 and, by 2025, a third of the world’s nations
will have catastrophically low levels of water,” he said.
“Encouraging change in consumption patterns and in increasing access to
water supply and sanitation is also a matter of developmental common sense,
since both yield very high rates of return, making them extremely attractive
from a social investment standpoint.”
The Vatican representative pointed to the reality of global warming and
its relation to the burning of fossil fuels and the use of other pollutants.
“We can no longer pretend that human activity has little or no
impact” on the worldwide “changing climatic conditions,” he
said.
“The Earth’s climate system has demonstrably changed on both
global and regional scales since the pre-industrial era,” Archbishop
Migliore said. “Even if greenhouse gas emissions were to be stabilized
at present levels – an unlikely eventually as things stand – the
global warming trend and sea-level rise would continue for hundreds of years,
due to the atmospheric lifetime of some greenhouse gases and the long
timescales on which the deep ocean adjusts to climate change.”
While noting the “legitimate priority needs of developing countries
for the achievement of sustained economic growth and the eradication of
poverty,” the archbishop said that these goals “cannot be
achieved at any price.”
The international community must transform its global energy systems from
traditional to renewable forms, he said. “As current approaches are
causing serious harm to human health, the Earth’s climate and
ecological systems on which all life depends,” he said, “the
development of renewables continues to be a human, ecological, economic and
strategic necessity and should have a priority in public research
projects.”
With more than 1.6 billion people lacking access to electricity,
“improving access to reliable, affordable and environmentally friendly
energy services is a major challenge to poverty eradication,”
Archbishop Migliore added.
He singled out the combustion engine as the engine behind the large
proportion of worldwide energy consumption, and major source of air pollution
and greenhouse gas emissions, urging its “long overdue”
replacement with “clean, renewable alternatives.”
“Sustainable patterns,” he said, are “essential to our
common future.”
“The dovetailing of environmental and developmental concerns with
commercial and industrial policymaking will surely lead to a safer, more
prosperous future for all,” he added.
Thank you for this article. Perhaps our view of life is skewed. If we could be content with less, and enjoy little things in this world, instead of always wanting more, then maybe we can start to work towards reducing the awful burden industrialized countries have put on our Earth. We are all in this together. My prayer is that we all, bit by bit, start to see that we need to work together to harmonize our needs instead of our wants with each other.
Thank you for reading this. Sincerely, Lindy Allen