The Pope today denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen saying that peace depends on safeguarding God’s creation.
He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps.
He has been dubbed the "green pope" for his increasingly vocal concern about the need to protect the environment.
Under his watch, the Vatican has installed solar cells on its main auditorium and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its carbon emissions.
In his speech, Pope Benedict criticised the "economic and political resistance" to fighting environmental degradation and creating a new climate treaty at last month's negotiations in Copenhagen.
Officials from 193 countries met at the summit but failed to produce a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead a non-biding accord that included few concrete steps to combat global warming was agreed.
The Copenhagen summit did set up the first significant programme of ensuring aid to help poorer nations cope with the effects of a changing climate. But while the accord urged deeper cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, it did nothing to demand them.
"I trust that in the course of this year ... it will be possible to reach an agreement for effectively dealing with this question," the Pope said.
He said the issue was particularly critical for island nations and in places like Africa, where the battle for resources, increased desertification and over-exploitation of land has resulted in wars.
He said the same "self-centred and materialistic" way of thinking that sparked the worldwide financial meltdown was also endangering creation. To combat it will require a new way of thinking and a new lifestyle - and an acknowledgement that the question is a moral one, he said.
"The protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, inasmuch as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and which comes from God," he said.
To illustrate his point, the pope pointed to the experiences of eastern Europe under the "materialistic and atheistic regimes" of the former Soviet bloc.
"Was it not easy to see the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water and air?" he asked.
"The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation."
AP