Vast crowds of children skipped school yesterday to join a global strike against climate change, heeding the rallying cry of teen activist Greta Thunberg and demanding that adults act to stop environmental disaster.
It was expected to be the biggest protest ever against the threat posed to the planet by climate change.
Yelling slogans and waving placards, children and adults across Asia and the Pacific kicked off the protest, which later spread to Africa and Europe, with huge crowds filling the streets.
Photo: Reuters
“We are the future. We are schoolchildren and we are not going to school,” 15-year-old Vihaan Agarwal, said in Delhi. “We believe there is no point in going to school if we are not going to have a future to live in.”
Organizers forecast 1 million participants overall.
In Australia alone, they said more than 300,000 children, parents and supporters rallied.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Stop climate change now,” “There is no planet B,” “Wake up!” read some of the signs brandished by demonstrators in a trendy central shopping district of Tokyo.
“We adults caused this planet emergency,” said Chika Maruta, 32, who was marching with her colleagues from a cosmetics company. “We should take our responsibilities for the next generation.”
Thunberg, 16, has accused leaders of not doing enough to prevent harmful climate change.
On the eve of the strikes, she said solutions were being “ignored.”
“Everything counts, what you do counts,” she said in a video message to supporters.
Demonstrators young and old echoed her cry.
“We have to reduce our carbon footprints to pretty much nothing in the next 12 years, otherwise there will be drastic consequences,” said Jonathan Lithgow, 15, one of about 500 children and adults protesting in Johannesburg.
He said that his school gave students permission to take part in the march.
The demonstrations were due to culminate in New York, where 1.1 million students in about 1,800 public schools have been permitted to skip school.
As the sun rose above the international dateline, events began in the deluge-threatened Pacific Islands of Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati — where children chanted: “We are not sinking, we are fighting.”
There was a similar sense of defiance across Asia.
“We are the future and we deserve better,” 12-year-old Lilly Satidtanasarn — known as “Thailand’s Greta” for her campaigning against plastic bags in malls — told reporters in Bangkok.
Adults “have just been talking about it, but they’re not doing anything,” she said. “We don’t want excuses.”
An increasing number of businesses backed the protests.
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday pledged to make the US technology and retail giant carbon neutral by 2040 and encourage other firms to do likewise.
Yesterday’s mass action set the scene for a range of high-profile climate events in New York.
A Youth Climate Summit is to take place at the UN today.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is on Monday to host an emergency summit in which he plans to urge world leaders to raise their commitments made in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
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