Pope warns of climate risks
THE Pope has blasted “shortsighted human activity” for global warming and rising sea levels, and urged leaders at climate talks in Germany to take a global outlook as they negotiate ways to curb heat-trapping emissions.
He met a delegation of Pacific leaders and told them he shared their concerns about rising sea levels and increasingly intense weather that is threatening their small islands.
He decried, in particular, the state of oceans, where overfishing and pollution by plastics and micro-plastics are killing fish stocks and sea life that are critical to Pacific island livelihoods.
The Pope warned that while several causes are to blame, “sadly, many of them are due to short-sighted human activity connected with certain ways of exploiting natural and human resources, the impact of which ultimately reaches the ocean bed itself”.