Pope Francis and the Vatican step up climate change campaign

The Pope will give a landmark announcement on climate change next month calling for leaders to adopt urgent measures to limit environmental degradation.

Pope Francis is due to deliver an Encyclical, an official statement, on the dangers of global warming at a summit at the Vatican on Tuesday.

The Vatican Science Academy will urge people to take action on the climate and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to deliver the opening address.

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sondoro, who heads the Academy, has called for action to help protect people in developing countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change including extreme weather events, drought and flooding.

The Vatican summit "Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity" is being held at the Academy, in gardens behind St Peter's Basilica.

It will include religious leaders, academics and scientists, including Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, former Royal Society President Lord Rees and leading economists Jeffrey Sachs.

The meeting will focus on the links between poverty, economic development and climate change and will include speeches and panel debates.

The Vatican is hoping to make a positive impact in the build up to the COP21 UN climate change conference to be held in Paris at the end of this year when a crucial global climate deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions and climate finance is due to be agreed.

Vatican officials have spent more than a year helping Pope Francis prepare the message and have already held several meetings on the issue including discussions with Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the United States, the encyclical will be accompanied by a 12-week campaign, now being prepared with the participation of some Catholic bishops, to raise awareness of the need for environmental stewardship in sermons, news media interviews and letters to newspaper editors.

Timothy E. Wirth, vice chairman of the United Nations Foundation, said: “We’ve never seen a pope do anything like this. No single individual has as much global sway as he does. What he is doing will resonate in the government of any country that has a leading Catholic constituency.”

Francis, however, is not the first pope to push an environmental message. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, called the “green pope” by some, wrote about the environment and the impact of climate change in documents that have been collected in a book, “The Environment.” But Catholic and climate policy experts acknowledge that those works had little substantive impact on global warming policy.