Greta Thunberg

Thunberg’s activism started after convincing her parents to adopt several lifestyle choices to reduce their own carbon footprint. In August 2018, at age 15, she started spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on climate change by holding up a sign reading Skolstrejk för klimatet (School strike for climate). Soon, other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together, they organised a school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. In 2019, there were multiple coordinated multi-city protests involving over a million students each. To avoid flying, Thunberg sailed to North America where she attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. Her speech there, in which she exclaimed “how dare you”, was widely taken up by the press and incorporated into music.

Greta says big governments and businesses around the world are not moving quickly enough to cut carbon emissions and has attacked world leaders for failing young people.

Initially, her protests focused on the Swedish government’s climate targets, and she urged students around the world to make similar demands in their own countries.

But as her fame has grown, she has called for governments around the world to do more to cut global emissions. She has spoken at international meetings, including the UN’s 2019 climate change gathering in New York, and this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.

At the forum, she called for banks, firms and governments to stop investing and subsidising fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. “Instead, they should invest their money in existing sustainable technologies, research and in restoring nature,” she said.

Thunberg has pointed out that climate change will have a disproportionate effect on young people whose futures will be profoundly affected. She argued that her generation may not have a future any more, because “that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money”. She also has made the point that people in the Global South will suffer most from climate change, even though they have contributed least in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Thunberg has voiced support for other young activists from developing countries who are already facing the damaging effects of climate change. Speaking in Madrid in December 2019, she said: “We talk about our future, they talk about their present.”