Catholic organisations call for people to change lifestyles to help environment

CIDSE, international alliance of Catholic social justice groups, follows Pope Francis's environmental encyclical by calling for action against global warming

More than a dozen Catholic organisations will on Wednesday launch a campaign calling on people to make radical changes to their lifestyle choices - including cutting energy use, eating less meat and buying locally produced food - after the release last week of Pope Francis's sweeping environmental encyclical.

The plan by CIDSE, an international alliance of 17 Catholic social justice groups from Europe and North America, will be announced at a press conference at the Vatican that will include Peter Turkson, the Ghanaian cardinal who helped draft the papal document, and Naomi Klein, the Canadian author and anti-globalisation activist, who has said that the only hope of avoiding catastrophic warming of the earth requires "radical economic and political change".