ABSTRACT
At a ceremony held on Earth Day, 22 April 2016, 177 parties signed the Paris Climate Change Agreement negotiated at the 21st meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.3 The record number of signatories seemed to signal something of a shift towards action on climate change that might result in a more socially equitable and sustainable future. Leading into the Paris talks, Pope Francis of the Catholic Church published an encyclical, On Care for Our Common Home: Laudato Si´ widely said to have inuenced the outcomes of the meetings. Anticipated by the press as a statement on climate change, the Pope, in fact, addresses climate change only briey in his lengthy document. Instead, like the framers of ‘The Future We Want,’ the outcome document of the 2012 Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, the Pope takes economic development and consumerism on directly, arguing that accelerating environmental change is a symptom of attitudes and practices of an unconstrained global capitalism. He charges Catholics (and members of other theistic traditions) with an obligation to care for ‘Creation,’ the term he uses for the Earth. Over twenty years earlier, the more secular Our Common Future (known as the Brundtland Report) published in 1987 by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development was among the rst international documents to discuss the environment and global economic development together. It is widely credited with having introduced notions of ‘sustainable’ economic development into
international consciousness. Both ‘The Future We Want’ and ‘On Care for our Common Home’ reframe ‘sustainable development’ as an issue involving more than economics. There is growing consensus that ‘sustainability’ must address not only economics, but justice and equity, and emphasise the importance of human values, attitudes, imagination and both cultural and biological diversity.
