by Tashko Mihaylov
Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old girl from Sweden has become a symbol of #fridaysforfuture, a movement by students who skip classes on Friday to protest climate change.
On a summer day in 2018 Greta Thumberg skipped school and sat outside the the Swedish parliament. She grabbed the attention of the international media and over the last few months, young people from everywhere around the globe are coming together against to make a statement.
Мore than 25.000 people gathered in Piazza del Popolo (People’s Square), a large urban square in Rome on April 19 to protest against the politicians’ unwillingness to undertake real efforts to tackle this global challenge. Greta Thunberg also arrived at the protest.
“Her [Thunberg’s] capability to catalyse the interest of the youth, together with the one of older generations, has been able to create an unprecedented interest among the media and political agendas all over the world,” said Giordano Margaglio, 23, a student in Lund University, Sweden and a protester in Rome.
Thunberg gave an inspiring 10 minute speech that captivated the audience, Margaglio said. He thinks that Italy should stop protecting the interests of the industries that produce carbon dioxide and investing money in the construction of environmentally destructive infrastructures. Instead, the government should do more for the transition towards renewable energies and reduce its impact of GHG emissions.
“As the governments around the world refuse to recognise the climate change as a serious problem, we have to make them understand by voicing our concerns about this issue. They seem to struggle solving the climate problem or they simply choose to do nothing about it,” said Andreas Papamichael, 27, Visual Artist who also works for Environmental Projects and attended the movement outside the Scottish Parliament in March.
On 29 of April, following the protests, Nicola Sturgeon called a “climate emergency" and promised Scotland “will lead by example” by cutting carbon emissions. She promised a low carbon economy in the next decades, they are taking action to decline the green house emissions by at least 90% by 2050. The UK Parliament also declared climate change emergency on the 1 May.
Slideshow photo credits: Wikipedia Commons, Andreas Papamichael, Giordano Margaglio.
UK is also a part of the Paris Agreement to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.
“As much as I agree with the Scottish government’s goal, this action has to be more serious, radical and extreme before it is too late. I believe that the change needs to come before 2050,” says Papamichael.
What about the US?
On 1 June 2017, President of the United States, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would no longer take part in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation. Trump stated that "the Paris accord will undermine (the U.S.) economy," and "puts (the U.S.) at a permanent disadvantage."
