Catholic organisations call for people to change lifestyles to help environment

More than a dozen Catholic organisations will on Wednesday launch a campaign calling on people to make radical changes to their lifestyle choices – including cutting energy use, eating less meat and buying locally produced food – after the release last week of Pope Francis’s sweeping environmental encyclical.

The plan by CIDSE, an international alliance of 17 Catholic social justice groups from Europe and North America, will be announced at a press conference at the Vatican that will include Peter Turkson, the Ghanaian cardinal who helped draft the papal document, and Naomi Klein, the Canadian author and anti-globalisation activist, who has said that the only hope of avoiding catastrophic warming of the earth requires “radical economic and political change”.

The pope’s encyclical, or church teaching, states that global warming is mostly a man-made problem. The nearly 200-page essay has been seen as a moral call for action to phase out use of fossil fuels and an urgent plea for world leaders to agree on a plan to tackle climate change.

But it is also a call for individuals to re-evaluate their lifestyle choices – like the decision to turn on the air conditioning instead of coping with the heat – and curb out-of-control consumption. In it, Francis even states that he supports consumer boycotts to force polluters to change their practices, saying that boycotts “prove successful in changing the way businesses operate, forcing them to consider their environmental footprint and their patterns of production”.

By aligning itself with CIDSE, the Vatican is once again clearly signalling that it supports an individual activist approach to environmental issues, which may or may not resonate with the world’s 1.2bn Catholics.

“We believe that collective and individual changes are crucial to respond to the urgency we face through climate change, environmental degradation and the consequence they have on people’s lives,” said Bernd Nilles, the secretary general of the CIDSE.

The Catholic groups will argue that, even though many people want to consume fair and sustainable products, that “politics and markets do not follow this demand”, according to a statement released before the press conference.

Quoting the pope – who said that “a change in lifestyle could bring healthy pressure to bear on those who wield political, economic and social power” – the groups are calling for “radical change” towards “living simply and making different and more conscious choices”.

It said a three-year campaign would focus on energy and food consumption, and would use social media and workshops to encourage people to make better daily choices. Some of the examples they suggest include cutting the amount of the energy people use, buying local and sustainably produced food, using public transport, and eating less meat.