What is net zero?
As we work to protect our common home, around the world governments are aiming to achieve ‘net zero emissions’. But what exactly is ‘net zero’ and is it something which is possible, a future where we no longer contribute to climate change? As Pope Francis demonstrates, in Laudato Si’, that while climate change is already happening, it will be the poorest and most vulnerable across the globe who will be hit hardest, and fastest. Our common home, and lives across the globe, face an unprecedented crisis in which we all play a role. In order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we need to make significant changes, and we need to go further, faster.
This animation is part of CAFOD’s Our Common Home campaign. Visit cafod.org.uk/climate to get involved and take action.
TRANSCRIPT
Laudato Si’, On care for our common home.
Pope Francis, 2015
217 “The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast”.[152]For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion
217 So what they all need is an “ecological conversion”, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.
218. We must examine our lives and acknowledge the ways in which we have harmed God’s creation through our actions and our failure to act. We need to experience a conversion, or change of heart”
219. The ecological conversion needed to bring about lasting change is also a community conversion.
220. This conversion calls for a number of attitudes which together foster a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness. First, it entails gratitude and gratuitousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift, and that we are called quietly to imitate his generosity in self-sacrifice and good works.
220. As believers, we do not look at the world from without but from within, conscious of the bonds with which the Father has linked us to all beings. By developing our individual, God-given capacities, an ecological conversion can inspire us to greater creativity and enthusiasm in resolving the world’s problems
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