Fridays for Future

On 20 August 2018, Greta Thunberg, who had just started ninth grade, decided to not attend school until the 2018 Swedish general election on 9 September after the heat waves and wildfires during Sweden's hottest summer in at least 262 years.
Her demands were that the Swedish government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement, and she protested by sitting outside the Riksdag every day for three weeks during school hours with the sign Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the climate). She also handed out leaflets that stated: "I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future."

One year on, the teenage activist’s Fridays for Future campaign has grow into a global movement involving people of all ages and backgrounds, including many scientists and scholars.

How it all started...

Greta says she first heard about climate change at school when she was about eight and her teachers showed pictures of hungry polar bears, deforested forests and plastics in the oceans. "When I was little, I had plans to be a lot of things, from actress to scientist. Until my teachers told me at school about climate change. That opened my eyes. I was very impressed."
When she was 11 years old, she suffered a severe depression. "I stopped going to school, I stopped talking because I was so sad. That made me very worried. It had a lot to do with the climate and ecological crisis. I thought there was something very wrong and nothing was being done, that nothing made sense." Once she realized that she could make a difference, she promised herself that "she would do something good with her life."

"So I sat on the floor outside the Swedish Parliament and decided I wouldn't go to school. On the first day, I was there alone. On the second day, other people started joining me. I could never imagine in my wildest dreams that it would happen. And it happened very fast."


Today, she has 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 472,000 on Twitter.