Pope continues to raise awareness on human-induced global warming

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

Harrowing accounts of girls forced into prostitution and modern slavery opened a two-day conference at the Vatican Tuesday, July 21, at which mayors from around the world testified to their efforts to fight forced labor and global warming.

Ana Laura Perez James was chained up for five years in Mexico and forced to work twenty hours a day.

“We can’t entrust everything to laws”, she said.

“We are human beings”, she said. “I think it’s helped reinvigorate the spirit for a lot of us”. “I thought I was just an object that was used and thrown away”.

Jacinto now campaigns on behalf of trafficking victims.

Political leaders in Canada, which has lagged behind other developed nations when it comes to tackling greenhouse gas emissions and will be sending a delegation to Paris, would do well to remember this.

On Tuesday, some leaders recounted their cities’ experiences with natural catastrophes worsened by environmental degradation.

“The volume of work is enormous, and as we approach the final few months before the great event, requests and correspondence in many languages, are pouring in from every country in the world”, said Donovan, who has returned to Rome. Mayor after mayor made an individual plea Tuesday for the world to change its ways.

Shortly after his address, Brown said we’ll all learn to adapt to a new climate, according to the Sacramento Bee.

“Pope Francis’ encyclical – a remarkable document – asserts that climate change affects the world’s most vulnerable people“, Hales says. He pointed to India’s ongoing drought, which is forcing farmers to relocate to cities and “pushing them into the dark dungeons of slavery”.

People are being “pushed by the highest moral authority to take the next step, no matter how challenging it appears to be”, he said.

Alberto Melloni, a liberal scholar and Vatican historian, said the aim of the conference was “not to act as a third party with the UN”.

The Paris conference, the declaration added, “could be the last effective opportunity” to limit the rise in Earth’s temperature to 2 degrees Celsius.

“Pope Francis’ leadership will build on the resounding unity of big cities worldwide in calling for meaningful and binding emissions targets, and for a climate agreement signed in Paris that respects the needs of our cities, our planet and generations to come”.

“The environmental agenda is inseparable from the social agenda”, Sao Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad said. 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.

“Climate negotiators must dare to push boundaries and exclude fossil fuels as an option and reward solutions that are long-term sustainable and renewable”, she said.

Earlier in the day, about 35 participants spoke to the assembly on the issues, including California Gov. Jerry Brown and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“I have great hopes for the Paris summit in December”, he said. “It’s increasingly clear that we, the local leaders of the world, have many tools, more than we may have in fact realized, and we must use them boldly even as our national governments hesitate”.

Writing from the Vatican this week, nestled near Saint Peter’s Basilica in a almost 500-year old office with frescos overhead, I’m managing the media rollout for a historic meeting of the world’s leading mayors, which the Pope attended today, to move forward the policies implicit in Laudato Si’.

Mayor Kagiso Thutlwe of Gaborone, Botswana, told CNS that he disagrees with claims that radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions will hurt development.