USCCB - Global Poverty | Issues

Global Climate Change and our Catholic Response

What is the issue?
Climate change is at the center of the environmental challenges facing our nation and the world. Some of the impacts of climate change include increased temperatures, rising sea levels, and changes in rainfall that contribute to more frequent and severe floods and droughts. People living in poverty—both at home and abroad—contribute least to climate change but they are likely to suffer its worst consequences with few resources to adapt and respond. The effects of climate change—increasingly limited access to water, reduced crop yields, more widespread disease, increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters, and conflict over declining resources—are making the lives of the world’s poorest people even more precarious.

Global Climate Change
We are called to be stewards of God’s creation, working to protect the environment with which we have been entrusted. Cecilia Calvo, Project Coordinator for Environmental Justice/Climate Change at USCCB, shares the distinctively Catholic perspective on climate change, which involves protecting both the environment and the poor persons who are often the worst victims of climate change even though they contribute to its causes the least. She also invites all Catholics to get involved in a new and exciting initiative.

How does Climate Change affect real people?

Photo by Andrew McConnell for CRS
Teshome, a farmer in Bedossa Betella, Ethiopia, grows carrots to support his family. Drought, one effect of climate change, has affected Teshome’s family and countless others.

One of the effects of global climate change affecting many countries has been severe weather, including both flooding and drought. In Ethiopia, the past several decades have seen repeated droughts, which have often led to famine due to farmers’ inability to grow food during droughts.

In some parts of Ethiopia, CRS has been able to help small farmers such as Teshome Bekele, pictured above, adapt to the effects of climate change. CRS’s project helps farmers diversify their incomes, introducing fruit, vegetables, spices and fodder to add to the crops they have grown for decades.

With drought becoming more frequent due to climate change, CRS hopes that growing a variety of crops less dependent on water will allow the farmers to continue to support themselves and their families.

But in most other parts of the country and world, farmers haven’t been so lucky. Experts agree that poor people are likely to be the worst hit by the impacts of climate change. The United Nations reports that by 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change.