Tracing the Roots of Pope Francis’s Climate Plans for 2015 - by Andrew C. Revkin

One of the highlights of my year, perhaps my career, was being able to participate in Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature:  Our Responsibility, a four-day Vatican workshop aimed at shaping strategies for human advancement that are attuned to the planet's limits, organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Academy of Social Sciences last May.

Now there are signs that the themes and conclusions developed in those sessions are helping to shape Pope Francis's planned push for serious international commitments in 2015 to curb greenhouse gases and gird communities, particularly the poorest, against climate-related hazards.

A first step will come in less than three weeks, when, during his visit to the Philippines, the pope is scheduled to have lunch with some survivors of the typhoon that devastated Tacloban in 2012.  The scope of the human calamity there was as much a result of deep poverty and poorly governed urban growth as the ferocity of Typhoon Haiyan.

The social and environmental roots of that disaster provide just the context the Vatican needs to reinforce its case that sustainable human progress will come as much through attacking poverty and fostering fairness as boosting environmental protection.

Those twin themes resonated throughout the Vatican meeting and have built since then, particularly in a speech delivered in London on Nov. 7 by Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who, as chancellor of both pontifical academies, was the chief organizer of the Vatican sustainability workshop.

That speech sketches out much of the pope's plans on climate change for the coming year.

Read more at Tracing the Roots of Pope Francis’s Climate Plans for 2015 - by Andrew C. Revkin