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Climate activists took part in a demonstration by Friday For Future as part of Global Climate Strike. The purpose was to call for climate change action on March 25, 2022, in Rome, Italy. Fridays For Future is a student-led global climate strike movement that was founded in August 2018 by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish student. Credit: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
After a two year hiatus due to pandemic lockdowns and other public health restrictions for Covid-19, the world’s youth are once again marching in the streets en masse, lambasting their leaders for the continued rise of global greenhouse gas emissions and demanding that they do far more to address the rapidly worsening climate crisis.
Twitter and other social networks have already seen photos of protests flooding in. High school students protest outside an investment bank in Tokyo demanding that it stop funding new coal plants. In Bangladesh, children—some of whom have yet to reach their teenage years—are standing waist deep in water, urging world leaders to do more to stop the rising seas that are already making floods worse in their hometowns. And at the Neumayer Station III research facility in Antarctica, climate researchers are holding signs with nothing but their lab and frigid tundra behind them, demanding more be done to slow the melting of the earth’s glaciers and ice caps.
Friday is the day for more than 700 protests around the world according to Friday’s for Future, the youth climate strike organization that sprung from Greta Thunberg’s solitary school strike and vigil at the Swedish parliament in 2018.
By 2019, Thunberg’s humble protest had It has evolved into a major movement, as she led an estimated 250,000 people through New York City’s financial district, demanding that Wall Street investors move their money toward renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, the main driver of human-caused climate change.
Concerned about the future of climate change, young people and children skipped school to join the protests. Around 6 million people were reported to have participated in the 2019 strikes. It was believed that this was the largest climate demonstration in history. It also sparked a significant political shift in how serious world leaders took the threat of global warmining.
However, youth climate activists have been active for the past two years. Zoom forces them to organize their movementsOnline and through other means, they claim that governments have done very little in order to wean their country from fossil fuels. They also fail to provide proper assistance to developing countries that are the least responsible for global warming and yet are the most affected by it. The $100 billion per annum promised by wealthy countries to help developing nations adapt to rising temperatures is still not enough.
Those criticisms were also leveled at world leaders after last year’s COP26 global climate talks ended in what environmentalists and climate campaigners Widely called a failure. Youth campaigners hope to bring back their demonstrations and press their leaders to take a stronger stance against the oil and gas industry by returning to the streets. Its grip remains strong on the world’s economic and political systems.
“We’ve been incredibly isolated and while the climate movement has continued during Covid, we need to reignite hope and strikes to push our leaders to act,” Liv Schroeder, the national coordinator and policy director for Fridays for Future U.S., told me in an email. “I want those in power to listen to us very carefully. Young people are angry, and I want fossil fuel executives to be as scared as we are.”
Friday’s strikes come as new reports from the scientific community show that the climate crisis is progressing far more quickly than previously thought, leaving even less time to implement solutions. In February, scientists around the globe participated in the Climate Summit. Released a landmark climate report, which warned that the world is already experiencing irreversible climate change and humanity isn’t moving nearly quickly enough to adapt.
And This week’s study in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment found that even with the record drop in emissions caused by pandemic lockdowns in 2020, global emissions have rebounded so much in 2021 that the world is likely now on track to warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels within the decade. This could jeopardize the Paris climate accord’s key target, which scientists believe must be met if we are to avoid the worst consequences from global warming by the end the century.
It’s a finding not lost on youth climate strikers like Schroeder. “Every fraction of a degree matters. The climate crisis does not allow for a moderate” approach, she said. “Nothing about what is headed our way will be moderate.”
That’s it this week for Today’s Climate. Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.
Today’s Indicator
25
That’s how many days earlier, on average, the world’s birds are laying their eggs compared to 100 years ago, A new study has shown that a majority of respondents are satisfied with the results.This points to global warming being a possible reason.
