27 September 2019: this date will go down in history. Two million people took part in the third global climate strike, one million in Italy alone. Relive every moment through the most significant data, images and voices of the participants.
Young people are afraid. They fear that those who hold decision-making power need only breathe on the future they dream of to blow it away, like sand through their fingers. Every day, in Kabul, they wonder whether it will be a bomb or unbreathable air that kills them. Every evening, in Kiribati, they ask themselves whether their home will be swallowed by the ocean. Every day, in the United States, they don't know whether they'll make it home from school because a classmate might have a gun hidden in their backpack. They have understood that they cannot rely on adults. That is why they have been forced to grow up faster than expected, giving up their own childhood in order to have a future.
They have taken to the streets. They are calling for tougher laws governing the buying and selling of weapons, with a force that Oprah Winfrey has compared to that of the civil rights activists who fought against racial injustice in the 1950s and 1960s. The same tenacity we find in the members of the environmentalist movement Fridays for Future who, however, have managed to engage in a battle that has drawn in the entire world. Because, after all, "climate change knows no borders. It doesn't care whether you are rich or poor, big or small. These are the challenges we call 'global', which therefore require unanimous solidarity," recalls Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations.
On 27 September, around thirty countries joined the third global climate strike; students, joined by workers and pensioners, demonstrated in at least 150 nations. In a single day, more than 2 million strikers made history, adding to the more than 4 million of the previous Friday, making the Climate Action Week the largest environmental demonstration ever organised – with a total mobilisation of approximately 7.6 million people of all ages.
On the 27th, Italy boasted the highest participation rates, with over one million demonstrators. LifeGate followed the event in the city of Milan, where 200,000 people responded to the call, according to estimates from the local committee. "There were more than twice as many of us compared to the first global strike on 15 March," says Miriam Martinelli, 16. "Governments cannot keep ignoring us, because change has come."
The Milan demonstration could not have gone ahead without Sarah Marder, the person who first brought the message of Greta Thunberg to Milan — the young Swedish activist who inspired the Fridays for Future movement. "Today is my 44th Friday in a row," she explains. "Yesterday the UN awarded us the Champions of the Earth prize, but we accepted it with reservations because, in truth, we don't feel like champions of the Earth given that what we are asking for has not yet been granted. We collected the prize with the idea of returning it to world leaders, in the hope that they become champions of the Earth."
In Rome, too, there were 200,000 people; in Naples 80,000, who formed a march one and a half kilometres long. These were joined by 50,000 in the city of Florence; 20,000 in Bologna and Turin, where the flood of people was remarkable; 10,000 in Palermo and Bari, to name just a few of the 160 Italian cities that joined the strike, also supported by the Minister of Education, Lorenzo Fioramonti.
Governments cannot keep ignoring us, because change has come. Miriam Martinelli, climate activist
The first images from the rest of the world came from New Zealand, where 170,000 demonstrators took to the streets, equal to 3.5 per cent of the population, giving rise to one of the largest demonstrations the nation has ever witnessed.
Thunberg, who reached North America by sailing boat to attend the Climate action summit on 23 September, struck in Canada, specifically in Montréal, the very city where the world's aviation leaders had gathered to discuss emissions generated by air transport which, according to a report published on 19 September, are greater in a single year than those produced by Germany. No fewer than 500,000 people joined her, equal to around 30 per cent of the population: as announced by Mayor Valérie Plante, it was the largest strike in the city's history.
In Stockholm, the activist's home country, 60,000 people expressed their solidarity with the cause she has championed. Striking images arrived from Berlin, where thousands of colourful umbrellas stood out against grey, rain-laden clouds. Photographs capturing streets flooded with people also came in from India, which "boasts" 14 of the 15 most polluted cities in the world; from Taiwan and Russia, from South Korea and from across Africa. One need only glance at Greta Thunberg's Twitter profile to map a world united for the climate.
