FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old teenager, sat in front of the Swedish parliament for three weeks, during school hours, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter, and it soon went viral. Her initial goal was to protest until Sweden’s 2018 general election, held on 9 September, but on 8 September Greta decided to keep protesting every Friday until Swedish policy provided a safe path to keep the planet’s temperature rise below 2°C, in line with the Paris Agreement. In December of that same year she gave a speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24), held in Poland, propelling her onto the global stage. Since then, thousands of students around the world have left their classrooms for a few hours to demonstrate outside their local parliaments and town halls. So why are children protesting? “Students are required to attend school, but as Climate Breakdown worsens, this goal of going to school is starting to become pointless. – Why study for a future that might not be there? – Why put so much effort into educating ourselves, when our governments aren’t listening to the educated?”.
These are some of the questions raised by the Swedish teenager, who urges people to demonstrate every Friday in front of their nearest town hall and asks them to bring a sign, take a photo and post it with the hashtags: #Fridaysforfuture #Climatestrike. This has only been the beginning. Students from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Ireland have already taken to the streets, and many other countries keep joining in every Friday. Soon comes their next move -much more ambitious- to raise awareness of the critical situation we are living through: on 15 March this student-led movement has called a global strike, calling for collective action by students around the world, including teachers and parents. The measures politicians are taking to curb Climate Change are not enough – rather limited, not to say non-existent – which is why young people are waking up to the climate emergency and to the lack of empathy and defeatism shown by adults. We could say they have had to take charge of their own future. Will you join the call to action?
Sources: https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/ https://https://www.facebook.com/events/1994180377345229/
