Young people across the world skipped their school and gathered together to take part in a massive youth-led movement to draw attention to the climate crisis.
According to the main organizing group #FridaysForFuture, there were more than 3,600 events planned. The third global youth-run climate strike of the year, Friday’s event was marked as the biggest yet. It seemed to deliver: streets in major cities around the world were shuttered with throngs of determined people holding clever signs and chanting.
The marches are leading up to the first-ever UN Youth Climate Summit in New York on Saturday.
“September 20 is not our goal,” Xiye Bastida, a 17-year-old climate activist who helped to organize the latest strike in New York, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a stepping stone, a catalyst for future action. It’s a point to tell the world we are watching.”
The climate strike movement is just over a year old, a 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, began the movement. She started striking alone every Friday in August last year outside of the Swedish Parliament building in Stockholm to call attention to climate change.
In the year since the movement was joined by hundreds to thousands of kids to strike regularly. Other climate movements, most notably Extinction Rebellion in the UK and the Sunrise Movement in the US, have tapped into growing frustration about a lack of climate action.
Thunberg has brought her blunt plea for climate action first to the international climate conference in Poland last year, the TED Talk stage, and, just this week, to the US Congress, where she told lawmakers, “This is the moment in history we need to be wide awake. Dreams cannot stand in the way of telling it like it is, especially not now.”
Here are scenes from how today’s strikes unfolded across the world:
New York City
16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who started the movement to strike for climate change, marched in New York City.
Los Angeles
Thousands joined the strike in downtown Los Angeles.
San Francisco
Students protested outside the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in downtown San Francisco.
Washington, D.C.
Young students and adults in Washington, DC gathered at the National Mall and marched to the U.S. Capitol. High school students at Montgomery Blair High School moved out of class and boarded the Metro, escorted by police, according to the Washington Post.
Kenya
Nearly a thousand protesters marched in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, some wearing outfits made from plastic bottles.
“Kenya has experienced both prolonged droughts and intense flooding every year since 2000,” according to a 2017 UNICEF report on the immediate effects of climate change in the country.
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