Pope Francis, the Climate Crisis and Global Ethics

This essay discusses the 2015 encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home , as a work of global ethics, noting that it is addressed to ‘every person living on this planet’. It situates it in the context of the extensive faith-based mobilisation leading up to the UN Paris Climate Conference in the same year, and refers to religious and interfaith statements on the environment and climate change, including the 2015 Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions and the Earth Charter, finalised in 2000. It concludes with an account of the Pope’s 2023 Laudate Deum: Apostolic Exhortation to All People of Good Will on the Climate Crisis , a constructive reflection on an ethics of mutual belonging, and a poem inspired by the Multifaith Ceremony following the People’s Climate March in 2014.