Young activists staged a coordinated “global climate strike” to highlight the effects of global warming and demand more aid for poor countries hit by weather chaos.
Protests from New Zealand and Japan to Germany and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Friday pressed rich nations to pay for the damage their carbon emissions are inflicting on the Global South and elsewhere.
Demonstrators also took to the streets in Jakarta, Tokyo, Rome, Berlin and Montreal carrying banners and posters with slogans such as, “It’s not too late.”
“If Jakarta is flooded, everyone who has money can leave. Where do I go? I will drown here in Jakarta,” one protester, who gave her name as Meta, said in Indonesia’s capital.
About 400 young activists gathered in the DRC’s capital Kinshasa chanting slogans such as “Act for Africa, protect our planet.”
As leaders of developing disaster-struck nations pleaded their cases at the United Nations, about 2,000 protesters marched through the streets of New York City to condemn climate inaction.
Dinah Landsman, 17, said every day she asks herself about what kind of future she will have as she grows older because of climate change. Her generation has to act, she said. “No one else is going to do it. It’s us who have the most at stake.”
The protests follow warnings from scientists that countries are not doing enough to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord’s top-line target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) this century compared with preindustrial times.