Caritas Scotland's Lexi Barnett at the handover
Archbishop Desmond Tutu led a rally in front of Copenhagen’s city hall to call for climate justice at the UN negotiations taking place here for two weeks.
Thousands came to hear him speak and to witness a handover of over half a million signatures to the UN climate chief Yvo de Boer.
Caritas and its sister Catholic network CIDSE contributed over 150,000 signatures to the final total through their joint Grow Climate Justice Campaign.
Archbishop Tutu, a nobel peace laureate, said the numbers put added pressure on world leaders to produce a legally binding deal in which countries committ to reductions in greenhouse gasses, to maintain a temperature rise of 2 degress centigrade, and to pay for poor countries to addapt.
Archbisop Tutu said, “We are all either winners or losers. If we don´t solve this problem, none of us will survive. The world can be a better place for all of us.
The UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said governments were worrying about an economic crisis, but what we are facing is a moral crisis. He said about the Copenhagen summit, “We have one chance to get this right.”
The final signature tallies are for Countdown to Copenhagen 512,894 signatures, of which Caritas and CIDSE provided 158,198.
Next, an ecumenical service in the Cathedral with the Protestant Archbishop of Cantebury Rowan Williams and Caritas Mexico President Bishop Gustavo Rodriguez Vega, plus the rest of us.
