LONDON: Children, some as young as eight, will walk out of class in cities around the world on Friday in a fresh wave of strikes called by young people who fear adults are sleepwalking towards a collapse in the global climate system.
With coordinators expecting more than a million youths to join protests in at least 110 countries, students inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg are demanding politicians and business leaders act quickly to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“We seem to have this amazing capability of forgetting horrible things and going on with our daily lives, but adults need to start acting,” said Helena Marschall, 16, who is coordinating a strike in the German financial capital Frankfurt.
“If we don’t act now we will soon reach crucial tipping points of our climate system, meaning after that there’s no way out anymore,” Marschall said, taking a break from lobbying Deutsche Bank executives to divest from polluting industries at the company’s annual general meeting on Thursday.
Since Thunberg began a single-handed climate protest outside the Swedish parliament in August, the Fridays for Future school strike movement has grown exponentially, with groups of friends inspired by her example rapidly clustering into larger, self-organising networks connected across time zones by social media.
After Marschall began striking on Friday afternoons with a small group of friends in December, support kept doubling until 8,000 young people protested in Frankfurt at an initial global strike on March 15. An estimated 1.5 million young people took part worldwide.
Against a backdrop of elections to the European Parliament, which began earlier on Thursday, the Frankfurt school strikers plan to march on the headquarters of the European Central Bank on Friday to demand it stop financing the fossil fuel industry. The ECB says its mandate is to control inflation and not to favour certain market sectors over others. — Reuters
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