According to initial estimates, the Catholic Church produces as much global warming trigger carbon emissions as the Australian Government, minus defence operations. The Church is starting a carbon audit of thousands of churches and parish buildings, about 1,500 schools and more than 300 hospitals and aged care facilities, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
The move has gained the support of the former US vice president and environmental campaigner Al Gore.
"In the business world there's an old saying, 'You manage what you measure'," Gore said in a statement.
Catholic Earthcare, an organisation set up in 2002 by bishops to advise the Church on environmental issues, admitted the Australian Catholic Church has a carbon footprint dwarfing other major organisations, AAP reports.
"Although measurement has just begun, Catholic Earthcare estimates the carbon emissions of the Catholic Church in Australia could be in the vicinity of 1.2 million to 1.5 million tonnes annually," a Carbon Earthcare statement said.
"This is on a par with the carbon emissions of the Australian government, excluding defence operations, of 1.7 million tonnes, and dwarfs the emissions of organisations such as the National Australia Bank and Insurance Australia Group."
Jacqui Redmond, Catholic Earthcare's executive director, said the decision to analyse the Church's carbon emissions using high-tech new tools developed by CarbonSystems, a private firm which helps organisations reduce carbon output, would lead to a reduction of the Church's footprint.
Al Gore backed the move: "The availability of this new tool for measuring our impact on the environment will allow us to measure and manage, to help us to be good stewards in caring for God's creation."
The Church's plan is being called "a strategic, systems based integrated initiative", which soon became ASSISI - coinciding with the home of St Francis, patron saint of the environment, the Sydney Morning Herald added.
The Sydney company doing the audit, CarbonSystems Australia, said the project was enormously complex. "This is probably the biggest voluntary environmental program going on in Australia," its managing director, David Solsky, said.
"We have found that compared to a lot of businesses that are just doing this for compliance reasons, the Catholics really have the desire to live in a more sustainable way."
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Source (CTHN)
SV (ED)