Cardinal Peter Turkson has said that “responsible parenthood” could “offer a solution” to the problem of climate change. The Ghanaian cardinal, the Pope’s leading adviser on climate issues, told the BBC last week that the Church had never been against natural family planning (NFP), despite what was often suggested by secular media. Speaking in Paris during the COP21 climate change conference the cardinal said that climate change was a looming ecological disaster. At the UN Conference at Le Bourget, in the north of Paris, the cardinal suggested that “responsible parenthood” could help alleviate some of the impacts of climate change, including the lack of food in parts of the world where there was still hunger. He told the BBC: “Having more mouths to feed is a challenge for us to be productive also, which is one of the key issues being treated over here, the cultivation and production of food, and its distribution. The amount of population that is critical for the realisation of this is still something we need to discover, yet the Holy Father has also called for a certain amount of control of birth.” Cardinal Turkson is thought to have played a major role in the drafting of Laudato Si’, the Pope’s encyclical on climate change. The 67-year-old is also considered to be papabile. The BBC reported that Cardinal Turkson was “at pains to stress that artificial birth control methods such as the contraceptive pill were still beyond the pale as far as the Church was concerned”. But later in the week Cardinal Turkson nonetheless clarified his comments, telling the Catholic news organisation Aleteia: “This has been talked about, and the Holy Father on his trip back from the Philippines also invited people to some form of birth control, because the Church has never been against birth control and people spacing out births and all of that. So yes, it can offer a solution.” The headline “is more exciting than the content itself” he said of the BBC report: “It’s not what happened.” He noted that in the English-speaking world, “birth control” informally referred to artificial contraception. “Ordinarily, in a Church document, the expression they would have used is ‘responsible parenthood’. That’s the expression that’s normally used,” he said.