Pope Francis will call on governments to curtail the use of fossil fuels use and on people around the globe to alter their lifestyles in order to avoid "unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem," Vox reported based on the leaked first draft of an encyclical the pontiff is set to publish on Thursday.

The leader of the world's more than 1.2 billion Catholics apparently contends that "the bulk of global warming" is caused by human activity and backs the science of climate change, noting that "plenty of scientific studies point out that the last decades of global warming have been mostly caused by the great concentration of greenhouse gases ... generated by human action," according to the Washington Post.

The encyclical is particularly critical with richer nations and has ample potential to "anger some of (Francis') conservative critics," the newspaper noted. "Enlighten the masters of power and money so that they should not fall prey to the sin of indifference, so that they should love the common good, support the weak, and care about this world that we inhabit." 

The Vatican's chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told journalists on Monday that the leaked document was an "intermediate version" and warned that some provisions may be different from those in the final draft.

In theological terms, Francis addresses the biblical idea, found in Genesis, that God gave humanity "dominion" over the Earth, Vox noted; the pontiff interprets that line as assigning humans "the duty to protect (the Earth) and ensure the continuity of its fertility for future generations."

The Argentine-born Church leader also calls for a "world political authority" that would aim "to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis, to prevent deterioration of the present and subsequent imbalances; to achieve integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; (and) to ensure environmental protection and pursuant to the regulations for migratory flows."

In the United States, about 70 percent of Catholics think global warming is happening, a slightly higher percentage than for Americans as a whole, the Washington Post recalled based on a poll conducted by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication.