What started with one passionate young activist has become a worldwide movement with millions of students and adults alike across 185 countries joining forces last week to demand stronger action on climate change.

Just over a year ago in August 2018 a 15-year-old Swedish school student named Greta Thunberg began taking every Friday off school to demonstrate outside Swedish parliament. Her demand was simple: stronger action on climate change.

Soon after, other students began to take up her example by holding climate protests in their own community, and before long they had founded the school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. By the early stages of this year, the movement had gone truly global with school strikes involving an estimated 1.4 million students took place in over 2000 cities worldwide in March. 

The movement has only grown since then and last weeks Global Climate Strike represented the biggest showing yet. Some 4 million people in 185 countries around the world participated in strikes, with a record 300,000 Australians gathering at rallies around the country.

Whilst some groups had their own grievances to air, a unified message was clearly sent to world leaders on the eve of the UN climate summit to take action to cut emissions and stabilise our global climate. The latest round of UN talks were called by Secretary-General António Guterres, who has asked leaders to come to the summit with firm plans to address the global climate emergency.

 

Positive Action

• If you missed out on Friday’s strike you can still get your voice heard on climate change. Contact your local political representatives to let them know what you would like to see.
• Whilst governments around the world need to step up and take action on climate change, individuals can still do their part. Check out our recommendations for a living low carbon lifestyles.

 

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Positive Environment News has been compiled using publicly available information. Planet Ark does not take responsibility for the accuracy of the original information and encourages readers to check the references before using this information for their own purposes.