Asia’s largest Catholic country has mobilised after the pope’s warning to tackle climate change, promising to gather 10m signatures for a petition that will be handed to world leaders at a Paris climate summit in November.



The Catholic climate petition aims to pressure countries to drastically cut carbon emissions to keep the global temperature rise below the dangerous 1.5°C threshold, and to help the world’s poorest to cope with climate change.

“We’re getting signatures as a representation of the Catholic’s voice on the issue of climate change, especially in pushing global leaders to urgently act,” said Lou Arsenio, in Manila, the local coordinator for the Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM), a coalition of more than 140 Catholic groups.

Pope Francis’s June encyclical on the environment said the world must act on climate change and that a failure to do so presents an undeniable risk to a “common home” that is beginning to resemble a “pile of filth”.

The Philippines, a country of 100 million, aims to deliver half of the 20m signatures targeted by GCCM and its partners. Its 76 million Catholics, who follow papal edicts closely, are aware of the disasters wrought by climate change on the archipelagic country.

Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest typhoon known to ever hit land, flattened communities and killed at least 6,000 people in central Philippines in 2013. It is a tragedy that compelled the pope to visit in January to console the survivors.



About a third of Filipinos see environmental problems as the greatest in the world.

Flash floods and landslides plague Manila as the monsoon season starts. Arsenio, who is also the ecology ministry coordinator of the Manila archdiocese, cites growing cases of food poisoning, which she blames on rising temperatures.

The Philippine Catholic church, established by Spanish colonialists in the 16th century, has already been at the forefront of environmental battles, particularly against large-scale mining operations and coal-fired power plants.

The pope’s encyclical provides a “clear and unequivocal” mandate from the church, which has electrified Catholic Filipino environmentalists, said Father Edwin Gariguez.

“When you see 300 priests in Lipa, for example, going out to protest against the coal-fired power plant, I’m sure they are more than inspired by the pope’s encyclical to take on this stand,” Gariguez told the Guardian.

Gariguez was recognised by the Goldman environmental prize for leading a grassroots movement against illegal nickel mining in Mindoro island, an area recognised as one of the world’s most biodiversity-rich marine environments.

The encyclical was an affirmation of what the Philippine Catholic church had long been a witness to: the link between the environment and poverty.

“Pope Francis was able to contextualise the discourse on a much wider framework to point out the interconnectedness of everything. It is now easy to realise that the ‘cry of the Earth is the cry of the poor’, ” he said.

Gariguez, who is also the executive director of the church’s nationwide social action group the national secretariat for social action (Nassa), said the church would continue to take concrete initiatives and interventions to address climate change and its impact on poverty.

“We have an ongoing program for the rehabilitation of the nine Haiyan-affected provinces. We are now in the second year of implementing our rehabilitation program, costing around eight million euros,” said Gariguez.

Nassa also promotes sustainable farming. “We believe that by using existing sustainable farming techniques, we can increase progressively soil organic matter by 60 tonnes per hectare over the next 50 years. In the process we would have captured more than two-thirds of the current excess of CO 2 in the atmosphere,” he said.

The commitment is repeated in church organisations around the country, such as Singles for Christ (SFC), a nationwide organisation of young Catholics which has launched a “love for nature” campaign.

“We always see flooding in the news. That is not God-made,” said Joanne Rentutar, SFC’s advocacy head. “It is caused by garbage, which is man-made. We have to make the SFC members understand the issue so they can be catalysts of change.”