Caritas outlines its' hopes for COP21

(Vatican Radio) The Cop21 climate talks officially open in Paris Monday with world leaders hoping to banish the memory of the failed Copenhagen meeting in 2009.

Over the next two weeks they will be looking to find common ground in order to steer the global economy away from dependence on fossil fuels and to hold back the earth's rising temperatures.

The leaders arrive at the United Nations climate change talks in Paris bringing with them promises and high expectations.

Most scientists say failure to agree on strong measures at the summit would doom the world to ever-hotter average temperatures, and more frequent natural disasters.

Martina Liebsch, head of policy and advocacy for Caritas Internationalis spoke to Vatican Radio about the urgency to achieve and agreement in Paris and the voice of Pope Francis on the issue of climate change.

Listen to Lydia O’Kane’s interview with Martina Liebsch

She says, “It is urgent because we see the devastating effects of climate change and specifically the devastating effects on those who are the most poor and vulnerable and they are those who contributed least to global warming the emission of greenhouse gases, so it’s about justice here”.

Caritas has four key messages that it wants to bring to this conference which are, the signing up to a legally binding climate change agreement, supporting a human rights-based approach in the climate agreement, ensuring industrialised countries honour their funding commitment of US$100 billion per year to climate with 50 percent of public finances allocated to adaptation and encouraging the building of new models of development and lifestyles that both counter global warming and bring people out of poverty.

Martina Liebsch stresses that people in general need to “think about the way we are living, we are consuming and we are calling for phasing out the use of fossil fuels and having sustainable energy that is accessible to all.”

Speaking the about the voice of Pope Francis on the issue of climate change especially through this most recent encyclical Laudato Si, the Caritas expert hopes, “it will reach people’s and leaders ears, so they will take something which is really substantial to tackle climate change”.

The last time world nations struck a binding agreement to fight global warming was 1997, in Kyoto, Japan. But in those past 18 years the world has got even hotter and the Arctic sea ice is on average 820,000 square miles smaller. If that was not enough the number of weather and climate disasters worldwide has increased 42 percent.

The COP21 climate conference runs until December the 11^th.