It's the poor who pay the price for our inattention to climate change

This picture taken early in
September, 2013,  shows an
 aerial view of the
island of Male, the capital
 of the Maldives, illustrating
how little 'freeboard' the
city had left.

With his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” Pope Frances went further than perhaps anyone has before to reframe the entire debate around climate change by focusing on the world’s poor and the duty to protect them from environmental harms that they did not cause themselves.

Now, new research in the journal Scientific Reports has underscored the pope’s message by showing that when it comes to climate change, it is indeed the countries with the most to lose that tend to contribute to the problem least — and also the other way round. The countries that contribute most to the problem — such as China and the United States, the current top two emitters — tend to show less relative vulnerability to the impact compared with nations that have quite low levels of emissions, the research finds.

Read Chris Mooney’s article in The Washington Post - “Why climate change is really, really unfair.”