“As with most natural disasters, climate-related emergencies cause more suffering and personal loss on those who live in poverty,” Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, told members of the World Health Assembly in Geneva on May 21. He said preventing or mitigating the impact of climate change on those who are most vulnerable “will require more than economic allocations and policy-setting.” The world must promote a different culture guided by the values of compassion, respect, solidarity and a commitment to justice, he said. Archbishop Zimowski said climate change will affect the air, water and food supplies people depend on and aggravate “health problems that already exist,” including climate-related diseases. The world’s poor are the most vulnerable to climate change, he said, because they are the ones “who cannot afford protective structures to shield them from extreme forces of nature and who have little or no resources to arrange for temporary shelter and other basic necessities once their homes have been severely damaged or totally destroyed.”

This article appears in June 9-16 2014.