Greta Thunberg, youth climate activists slam adults over climate crisis

Greta Thunberg and other youth climate activists from across the globe on Thursday slammed world leaders for “inaction” on addressing the long-term impacts of climate change, arguing that young people “will have to clean up the mess you adults have made.”

The criticism came in a guest essay published by The New York Times on Thursday, a day before the three-year anniversary of when Thunberg skipped school to protest outside the Swedish Parliament, kick-starting a global youth-led movement aiming to bring attention to the climate crisis. 

“Today, millions of children and young people have united in a movement with one voice, demanding that decision makers do the work necessary to save our planet from the unprecedented heat waves, massive floods and vast wildfires we are increasingly witnessing,” the activists wrote. 

“Our protest will not end until the inaction does,” they added, calling climate change the “single greatest threat to our futures.” 

“We are the ones who will have to clean up the mess you adults have made, and we are the ones who are more likely to suffer now,” added Thunberg, along with Mexico’s Adriana Calderón, Bangladesh’s Farzana Faruk Jhumu and Kenya’s Eric Njuguna. 

The activists cited the release of a new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which noted that nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children are at an “extremely high risk” of experiencing detrimental climate change outcomes, including greenhouse gas pollution, flooding and heat waves. 

UNICEF also found that every child on the planet is exposed to at least one climate and environmental hazard, shock or stress, including air pollution and water scarcity. 

Thunberg and her peers wrote that the report shows the state of the “world being left to us.” 

“But there is still time to change our climate future,” they continued. “Around the world, our movement of young activists continues to grow.” 

The youth activists noted that the UNICEF report revealed that many of the “higher-risk countries are poorer nations from the global south, and it’s there that people will be most impacted, despite contributing the least to the problem.” 

“We will not allow industrialized countries to duck responsibility for the suffering of children in other parts of the world,” they continued. “Governments, industry and the rest of the international community must work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as 195 nations committed to do in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.”

“We are in a crisis of crises,” they wrote. “A pollution crisis. A climate crisis. A children’s rights crisis.” 

“We will not allow the world to look away,” they said.

The essay also follows the United Nations’s release last week of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report finding that countries’ fossil fuel emissions have guaranteed that global warming will increase at a substantial rate over the next 30 years.