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| Wed, 28th Jul 2021 15:02:00 |
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Greta Thunberg: Who is the climate campaigner and what are her aims? |
Greta Thunberg is an 18-year-old activist from Sweden.
She has become one of the world's best known climate campaigners.
Three moments that made Greta Thunberg a global figure
1. School strikes
Thunberg started protesting outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, when she was 15.
She held a sign saying "School Strike for Climate", to pressure the government to meet carbon emissions targets.
Her small campaign had a global effect, inspiring thousands of young people across the world to organise their own strikes.
By December 2018, more than 20,000 students - from the UK to Japan - had joined her by skipping school to protest.
A year later, she received the first of three Nobel Peace Prize nominations for climate activism.
2. Challenging world leaders at the United Nations
In 2019, Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic on a yacht to attend a UN climate conference in New York.
Delivering what is probably her most famous speech, she angrily told world leaders they were not doing enough.
"You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words," she said.
3. Sparring with Trump and Putin
Thunberg was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in December 2019.
Her growing fame caught the attention of world leaders, not all of them supportive.
Donald Trump, who was US president at the time, tweeted that she should "work on her anger management problem" and go to "a good old fashioned movie with a friend".
Thunberg then changed her Twitter bio to: "A teenager working on her anger management problem."
She changed it again to quote Russian President Vladimir Putin's description of her as a "kind but poorly informed teenager".
The following year, she told the World Economic Forum in Davos the world should be "scared" by Mr Trump's decision to leave the Paris accord - an international agreement setting countries' emissions targets.
Read original full article
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