Bangalore, India, March 4, 2023
Introduction:
The 20-year-old Greta Thunberg, a Swedish environmental activist who worked to address the problem of climate change, founding in 2018 a movement known as Fridays for Future (also called School Strike for Climate), has been in the news Greta Thunberg ever since for public appearances, speaking at the UN, being a spearhead for climate change activism, and always speaking up for the oppressed.
Starting on August 20, 2018, just a school student Greta Thunberg, aged 15, skipped school to protest outside the Swedish parliament for more action against climate change. In just a few months, she began to gather support from the concerned youth. She began a regular ‘strike’ from classes every Friday to protest climate issues.
She also invited other students to join her weekly “Fridays for Future” campaign by initiating walkouts at their own schools. By November of 2018, more than 17,000 students in 24 countries were taking part in “Fridays for Future” strikes and walking out of their schools while she began speaking at high-profile events across Europe, including U.N. climate talks in Poland.
In a period of six months after her initials protest began, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest person to be Global Fame awarded this honor. The number of students taking part in school strikes rose dramatically as a result of this boom in popularity and reached more than 2 million people across 135 countries.
She was also named one of the world’s most influential people by Time magazine, appearing on its cover. “Now I am speaking to the whole world,” she wrote on Twitter. Many people consider this her biggest breakthrough in the world at large.
Her passion and commitment to climate and our world at large can be seen when attending a United Nations climate summit; Thunberg, who Icon opposes flying, cruised from Britain to the United States in a zero-emission boat.
She is, however, most easily recognized by her speech at a U.N. summit in September 2019, where she accused world leaders of having “stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words” in a scathing speech that gained her overnight popularity among the youth and certainly pushed her agenda to encourage the masses to fight climate change.
Her accolades are endless for one so young. Considered Sweden’s version of the Nobel Prize, she is one of the 2019 Right Livelihood Award’s four recipients.
As the 16-year-old became the youngest person to be named Time Magazine’s person of the year, Thunberg criticized “clever accounting and creative PR” to hide a lack of genuine action on climate change in a speech at the U.N. COP25 summit in another scathing speech.
Her journey has been one to see and to be inspired by. Climate change is not just another question to be answered in exams or to be discussed in closed meeting halls. It is very real, and it is happening. One has to think, if a singular school-going kid can do so much to bring a change into the world, what can we, as a collective 8 billion people of the world, do? I think the word for that accomplishment would be – a miracle.
