Your Holiness Pope Francis,

The world is facing many serious and pressing issues, not least climate change, deforestation, species loss, pollution, the decimation of the oceans, antibiotic resistance, the suffering of billions of animals, and chronic health complaints. What all of these things have in common is animal farming and the consumption of animal products.

Animal farming is one of the largest contributors to human-caused climate-changing emissions, generating more greenhouse gases than the entire global transport sector combined.

Your Holiness, we are asking you to help us fight climate change with diet change by going vegan for Lent.

Animal farming uses 83 percent of agricultural land but provides just 18 percent of our calories. Since it takes a lot more land to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods, ancient forests are razed to the ground, and the animals who live there are displaced or killed.

Your Holiness, we are asking you to help us fight deforestation and species loss with diet change.

Billions of farmed animals produce an enormous amount of waste, which leaks out of store tanks causing destruction to aquatic wildlife and creating ocean dead zones. Nitrogen compounds from fertilisers and animal waste also make farming the ‘biggest single cause of the worst air pollution in Europe’.

Your Holiness, we are asking you to help us fight air, sea and land pollution with diet change.

More than 30 percent of the world’s fisheries have been pushed beyond their biological limits and are in need of dramatic action to restore them, while whole populations of fish are on the verge of collapse.

Your Holiness, we are asking you to help us save the oceans through diet change.

Antibiotics are widely used to keep animals alive in squalid factory farm conditions. Because of their overuse, diseases are becoming resistant to some antibiotics and this threatens all of our futures.

Your Holiness, we are asking you to help us end antibiotic resistance through diet change.

Billions of animals spend their entire lives inside factory farms yet when faced with the realities of their lives – the filth and squalor, sickness and desperation, pain and misery – most of us find the system impossible to justify.

Your Holiness, we are asking you to help prevent animal suffering through diet change.

Too many people suffer from serious but often preventable health conditions, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancers, which can be connected to our increased consumption of animal products.

Your Holiness, for all these reasons, we are asking you to try vegan for Lent, and to encourage others to do the same.

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