Francis...the eco-warrior

He said environmental action a moral imperative Pontiff knew poor paid highest price

- NICOLE WINFIELD

FEW moments in Pope Francis' papacy better exemplify his understanding of the need to address climate change than the rain-soaked Mass he celebrated in the Philippines in 2015.

Wearing one of the cheap plastic yellow ponchos that were handed out to the faithful, he experienced firsthand the type of freak, extreme storms that scientists blame on global warming and are increasingly striking vulnerable, low-lying islands.

He had traveled to Tacloban, on the island of Leyte, to comfort survivors of one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones, Typhoon Haiyan.

The 2013 storm killed more than 7,300 people, flattened villages and displaced five million residents.

But with another storm approaching Tacloban two years later, Francis had to cut short his visit to get off the island.

"So many of you have lost everything. I don't know what to tell you," he told the crowd in Tacloban's muddy airport field as the wind nearly toppled candlesticks on the altar.

Francis was moved to silence that day by the survivors' pain and the devastation.

He would channel it a few months later when he published his landmark encyclical, "Praised Be," which cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern.

The document, written to inspire global negotiators at the 2015 Paris climate talks, accused the "structurally perverse," profit-driven economy of the global north of ravaging Earth and turning it into a "pile of filth".

AWAKENING He argued the poor, indigenous peoples and islanders like those in Tacloban suffered most, bearing the brunt of increasing droughts, extreme storms, deforestation and pollution.

It was the first ecological encyclical, and it affirmed the Argentine Jesuit who in his youth studied to be a chemist, as an authoritative voice in the environmental movement.