Vatican Unveils Laudato Si' Atlas of Creation Care
Thousands of Catholic institutions plot environmental plans as Sister Smerilli links ecology to conversion of heart and care for the poor.
On November 4, 2026, the Laudato Si' Action Platform of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development launched its Atlas of Laudato Si' and presented its fifth annual report at a press conference in the Holy See Press Office in Rome.
The digital atlas connects the work of participating Catholic institutions with geographic and climate data. Users can select a country or diocese, identify participating bodies and, where consent has been given, consult their environmental plans and reflections. The tool also provides access to natural-disaster data and draws on material from the Leonum Institute of The Catholic University of America and the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) in Rome. American cartographer Molly Burhans pioneered the collection and curation of the data. “If you want to take environmental action, you should understand the environment. The best way to understand the environment is maps,” she said.
Participants and a Call to Conversion
The platform, active for five years, reports more than 13,000 registered profiles—including some 6,200 institutions and 7,400 families and individuals—and cites about 13,600 participants since 2021.
Sister Alessandra Smerilli, F.M.A., prefect of the Dicastery, stressed that the initiatives “are not simply environmental projects, but decisions about what we teach and protect, about the use of the goods entrusted to us, about the world we leave to future generations.” She added that “we have learned that an invitation is not enough: those who call for a commitment must also accompany those who take it up.” Living the vocation as guardians of God’s work, she said, is “not something optional nor a secondary aspect of Christian experience,” and “caring for creation and caring for humanity are one and the same task.” She described Laudato Si' not as a text “to be simply read or cited” but as an invitation to conversion that heals the three fundamental relationships wounded by sin: with God, with neighbor, and with the earth.
Continuity Across the Church
Bishop Allwyn D’Silva, auxiliary bishop emeritus of Bombay, recalled a “carbon fast” promoted in the archdiocese to reflect on electricity, water, and plastic use. “The seeds sown by Laudato Si' have borne much fruit in different parts of the world,” he said, arguing that the platform helps ensure continuity when pastors or volunteers change roles.
Alonso de Llanes, director of the program, observed, “We have discovered that it is possible to build a platform, but you cannot build a path without people,” noting that local knowledge often exists but its holders cannot easily connect with others. Sister Roxanne Schares, S.S.N.D., executive secretary of the International Union of Superiors General, said the union represents 600,000 religious women on five continents and that more than half of the world’s congregations take part in the platform. Lorna Gold, executive director of the Laudato Si' Movement, pledged continued mobilization and said the next five years “must show what changes the Church is willing to implement.”
The launch comes more than a decade after Pope Francis’s encyclical on the care of our common home, inviting the faithful to unite protection of creation with the defense of human life and the poor.