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Global climate strike: Thousands rally across the world demanding urgent action

WION Web Team
New DelhiUpdated: Sep 25, 2021, 04:46 PM IST
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Photograph:(Reuters)

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The agitations were planned in over 1,800 locations by youth movement Fridays for Future

Weeks before the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, thousands of people across 99 countries took to the streets in a coordinated global strike, demanding urgent action to tackle the environmental crisis.

The strike on Friday was the first worldwide climate action since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It takes place five weeks before the COP26 summit, which aims to secure more ambitious climate action from world leaders to drastically cut the greenhouse gas emissions heating the plane

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg led the protests in Germany, just two days before the country’s general election.

Addressing a crowd of over 100,000 people in Berlin, 18-year-old asked them to keep the pressure on the political leaders even after the elections ends. 

“The concentration of CO2 in the sky hasn't been this high for at least 3 million years,” Thunberg told a crowd of thousands of protesters in Berlin.

“It is clearer than ever that no political party is doing close to enough,” she was quoted as saying.

The agitations were planned in over 1,800 locations by youth movement Fridays for Future, with small-scale demonstrations in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and spreading throughout the day in European cities including Warsaw, Turin and Berlin.

Supporters of ‘Fridays for Future'’ stage sit-in protest at the Central Secretariat Building, in New Delhi on Friday.

In India, the demonstrations concentrated in the national capital Delhi and eastern Kolkata state, where scores of people staged a sit-in protest, raising awareness about the determinantal impacts of air pollution.

In Mexico protesters assembled in front of the National Palace in Mexico City to demand that the state oil company Pemex present a plan to decarbonise, while in Bangladesh, activists demanded the scrapping of planned new coal and gas power stations.

“Everyone is talking about making promises, but nobody keeps their promise. We want more action," Reuters quoted Farzana Faruk Jhumu, 22, a youth climate activist in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

“We want the work, not just the promises,” she added.

Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the world’s carbon emissions must fall by half by 2030 to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels, the limit countries agreed to adhere to in the 2015 Paris climate summit.

Last week, the United Nations said that countries' commitments would see global emissions increase to be 16% higher in 2030 than they were in 2010 —far off the 45% reduction by 2030 needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

(With inputs from agencies)