Last Friday, millions of people around the globe participated in protests against inaction on climate change, uniting their voices with the ‘Fridays For Future’ student movement.
From Sydney and San Francisco to Berlin, Kampala, Bangkok and Athens, in capital and smaller cities across continents, crowds of children along with adults in solidarity marched in the streets demanding politicians take action to stop environmental disaster.
The epicentre for Australian rallies was Melbourne, where more than 300,000 participated, including many Greek Australians.
“We protest for our future,” Northcote student Yiannis Katsoulis told Neos Kosmos , while Keilor resident Toula Theodorou stressed that “this is only the beginning.”
“Young people will change the agenda and make adults care for climate,” she said.
Slogans in banners and signs were witty, often sarcastic, such as “I’ve seen smarter cabinets in Ikea,” or simply funny, like one placard reading “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% freaking terrified for our future”.
But the encompassing message was clear: people getting together and making a stand to demand climate justice.
Thousands of schoolchildren and students also joined the protest in downtown Athens, marching from Syntagma Square to Monastiraki.
“We are a global student movement and we protest against the inadequate response to the climate crisis,” students declared.
But people of all ages and from all walks of life were there too, some of them even coming from Down Under, like Georgia Zangalis (pictured), granddaughter of the vice-president of the Fair Go for Pensioners Coalition George Zangalis.
Little Georgia attended the march with her grandmother, Cavell, holding a banner reading “Greek Australians want climate action now.”
Meanwhile, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was quick to praise the students for their initiative posting on social media that “protecting the environment is an issue which finds us united[…] I congratulate our students on today’s mobilization.”
The Friday protests came ahead of the UN Climate Action Summit taking place this Monday, 23 September, at the organisation’s headquarters in New York.
State leaders from all over the world are expected to agree on actions to slow global warming, following the 2015 Paris climate accord on greenhouse gas emissions.
If anything, the message addressed by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is clear, telling officials to “bring plans, not speeches…”
