SÃO PAULO, Brazil – As Colombia prepares to host the 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (known as COP16) – which will happen between Oct. 21-Nov. 1 in Cali – the South American country’s Church has been reflecting on its role in the upcoming event.

Between Sept. 23-24, more than 200 church members gathered at the Caritas’s National Secretariat in Bogotá to debate the ways to deal with the several environmental crises faced by billions of people in the whole world.

They also looked at good practices developed over the years to take care of the Common House, especially since the publication of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015, and the Catholic initiatives to build alternative forms of preservation and production.

At COP15 – in Montreal, Canada in 2022 – the signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed on the Kunming-Montreal Global Diversity Framework, which established a number of goals concerning the planet’s biodiversity, most of them to be achieved by 2050.

The COP16 is to discuss the implementation and progress of the countries in hitting the targets made in 2022.

“The idea of the Bishops’ Conference and of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America [CELAM] was to promote joint reflections on the Church’s commitment to our Common House,” Bishop Juan Carlos Barreto of Soacha, who heads the Episcopal Commission of Social Pastoral (Caritas Colombia), told Crux.

Priests, members of Catholic congregations, and lay people coming from different parts of Colombia discussed the efforts that Catholics have been doing to work against environmental damage and raise awareness among communities on the need to protect nature. The idea was to gather the different perspectives shared during the meeting and produce a final document with the Church’s stance on COP16.

“Those debates allowed us to resume the postulates of Laudato Si’ and of [the 2023 apostolic exhortation] Laudate Deum, in order to prepare our participation not only in COP16, but also in the United Nations Climate Change Conference [COP30, which will happen in Brazil],” Barreto added.

Over the past years, several dioceses in Colombia have been incentivizing initiatives to transform the scenario of environmental devastation.

Projects involving sustainable production practices in protected areas occupied by peasants were developed in the city of Puerto Concordia, for instance. In Yarumal, Antioquia department, projects were elaborated by the local Church with the goal of restoring devastated biomes and replacing illicit economic activities with sustainable practices.

Father Arturo Arrieta, who heads the Diocese of Palmira’s Caritas, was one of the participants of the encounter. His region faces several environmental challenges – and the Church has been working to have a positive impact on the territory.

“In the Cauca Valley, one of the worst problems is illegal mining. Almost all mines present technical deficiencies and throw chemicals in nearby rivers, something that impacts the water, the soil, and the forest,” Arrieta told Crux. Rivers near Cali have high rates of lead and mercury due to illegal mining, he added.

The region is also impacted by the monoculture of sugar cane, which is traditionally burned as part of the production cycle.

“It produces great amounts of greenhouse gases and soot, with direct consequences to the environment and to human health,” he explained.

Deforestation is another historical problem in the region, with a continuous expansion of the farming areas.

But the local Church has been trying to resist. Years ago, it printed hundreds of copies of Laudato Si’ and organized workshops on the encyclical, training not only lay Catholics but also non-observing  members of local communities who were interested in learning about it.

“We promoted classes and encounters about many themes involving Laudato Si’, reflecting on subjects like the protection of water and the problem of monocultures,” Arrieta said.

Another project has the goal of transforming 10 parishes into “eco-parishes,” in which ecological conversion is a guiding principle for Church life.

“We also adopted principles of the Economy of Francesco in that proposition,” Arrieta said.

The pre-COP16 encounter happened in a moment in which most of South America faces an unprecedented drought, with wildfires destroying thousands of acres of biomes – large geographical areas with a distinct climate, vegetation, and animal life – in several countries, including Colombia.

That has been a reason for hopelessness among many environmentalists in the region, given that warnings have been made for years about the human actions that were causing relevant changes in the rainfall regime in the Amazon and other significant ecosystems, but little was done to change such a scenario.

“Despite that, it’s very important to make ourselves present to events like COP16 and have a positive influence, with objective and effective proposals,” Barreto said.