Birmingham Mayor William Bell meets with Vatican officials

“Climate change is the most urgent challenge facing humanity today, and it was a remarkable honour to meet with Pope Francis to discuss how cities and the global community can and must act to drastically reduce climate pollution”.

He emphasised the importance that the local mayors, who were gathered before him, had in shaping environmental debates at home, saying that true reform had to emerge from the periphery to be effective, and could not be imposed from above.

“It was a profound experience”, she told WCCO.

On the environment, the mayors’ declaration said “human-induced climate change is a scientific reality”, and called its effective control “a moral imperative for humanity”. “I look forward to joining my peers from around the world to collaborate on how we can prepare our cities for the future”. “We want sustainable development, without excluding the extremely poor”. One official said it was not a slight, but that cities facing the most severe crises of climate change and human trafficking were given priority at the podium.

“Not one of them saw the face of a 12-year-old?” she asked the group.

“We are human beings”, she said.

“It’s not possible that it still exists, that we remain blind” to the issue of modern slavery, said Ana Laura Pérez Jaimes, who spent five years chained up and forced to work 20 hours a day in Mexico.

Interviewed July 19 at the residence of the USA ambassador to Italy, Brown said, “I don’t think it’s any harder for a politician to think longer-term than it is for a businessman; they are both interested in short-term perspectives”. The 22-year-old mother of two now campaigns on behalf of trafficking victims.

Pope Francis will be coming to America in September and will visit Washington DC, New York City and Philadelphia. Still another has cut greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent since 1990 – while its GDP grew 19 percent.

He added that thanks to federal and state credits, San Francisco’s fuel costs will actually be reduced as a result.

Walsh shook hands with Bill de Blasio of New York City Tuesday at the Synod Hall in the Vatican.

Hodges, along with roughly 60 other mayors from around the world, met at the Vatican for two days beginning Tuesday. “It revealed that our problems from poverty to environmental degradation could destroy us all if we didn’t change”.

The climax of Tuesday’s inaugural session was the afternoon audience with Francis, who has become a hero to the environmental movement and has used his moral authority and enormous popularity to focus world attention on climate change and its effects on the poor.

Chammany detailed how years of global warming-induced drought in India was pushing impoverished farmers into cities, making them ripe for the “dark dungeons of slavery” and exploitation.

Brown’s comments come about a month after Pope Francis released his encyclical letter on global warming, blaming it on mankind and backing efforts by the United Nations to write an worldwide agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

French President Francois Hollande is calling for an ambitious accord on climate to address the threat of global warming. We are talking about climate regimes that have not been seen for tens of millions of years.

“I have great hopes for the Paris summit in December and hope a fundamental agreement is reached”, Francis said, referring to a key meeting at which a United Nations climate deal should be signed. This spring city council upped the ante, indicating it plans to 100 per cent of the energy it uses from renewable resources by 2050. Ahead of the meeting with the pontiff, Brown, who previously studied to be a catholic priest before entering politics, quoted from the Bible to make a case for moving away from the use of fossil fuels.