NEW YORK — Frustrated, anxious and a tad hopeful, young activists staged a coordinated “global climate strike” Friday to highlight the effects of global warming and demand more aid for poor countries hit by wild weather.
In New York, as leaders of developing disaster-struck nations pleaded their cases at the United Nations, more than a thousand protesters, many of them skipping school, marched through the streets to tell their leaders they were sick of inaction on climate.
“The oceans are rising and so are we,” they chanted. Protesters 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.”
“It’s one thing to worry about the future, and it’s another to get out there and do something about it,” Lucia Dec-Prat, 16, said at the protest in New York. “I honestly feel that the adults aren’t listening.”
Dinah Landsman, 17, said every day she asks herself about what kind of future she’ll have as she grows up because of climate change. Her generation has to act, she said.
“No one else is going to do it,” said Dinah, also in New York. “It’s us who have the most at stake.”
The protests follow warnings from scientists that countries aren’t doing enough to meet the 2015 Paris climate accord’s top-line target of limiting global warming to 2.7 Fahrenheit this century compared to preindustrial times.
Michael Taft, a 27-year-old graduate student in New York, said “a lot of kids here are scared about what the next 20 years are going to look like for them.”