Climate: 500 young people at the UN, including Greta Thunberg, demand action

In the aftermath of the global youth climate showcase, several hundred young people donned formal clothes Saturday, September 21 for a climate summit at the UN headquarters, just before the arrival in New York of hundreds of world leaders .

The UN has invited 500 young activists or green entrepreneurs to participate in this meeting of a new kind, but some could not come because of refused visas.

"Young people can not be arrested"

The tone was given at the opening by the furious speech of the young Argentine activist Bruno Rodriguez, 19, leader of the school strike movement in his country.

"The climate and the ecological crisis are the political crisis of our time," he said, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and other young people invited by the international organization. "We often hear that our generation will have to solve the problems created by the current leaders, but we will not wait passively to become this future," continued Bruno Rodriguez. "The time has come for us to be leaders".

"Young people can not be arrested," said 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, an idol of this movement without leaders of "Fridays for Future" school strikes.

The United Nations. #ClimateEmergency #EcologicalEmergency pic.twitter.com/G8UiQOllFP

A special climate summit

On Friday, from one end of the Earth to the other, masses of young people demonstrated to implore world leaders to do their homework on the climate, with rallies in 160 countries and more than 5,000 cities, and an announced participation. but difficult to verify of four million people.

The largest events were seen in Australia, Berlin, London, New York and San Francisco, but on all continents, high school students and children walked, placards in hand, alternating as each strikes between humor and reprimand against the generations that preceded them.

Monday, a special climate summit was convened by Antonio Guterres, with some sixty heads of state and government expected at the podium to present plans to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases revised upward.

"We are still losing the race, we continue to subsidize fossil fuels and there are still coal-fired plants," Guterres said. "But the momentum is changing."

With AFP