Fridays for Future, the youth-led global group inspired by Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg, announced Wednesday that its next international day of climate strikes will occur on March 19 of this year with a demand for “immediate, concrete, and ambitious action” directed at world leaders who have in recent years talked seriously about the urgent need to address the planetary emergency but stalled dangerously by failing to make those words a reality.
“No more empty promises,” said the group in its announcement for global strikes that will take place on every continent, led by students and their allies who believe that the rapidly heating world is an existential threat to life as humanity has come to know it and the insufficient and voluntary emission reduction targets like the ones at the center of the Paris Climate agreement—which nations are not even on track to meet—are worthless unless here-and-now policies are put into action immediately to bring carbon and other greenhouse gas pollution under control.
“If we don’t act now, we won’t even have the chance to deliver on those 2030, 2050 targets that world leaders keep on talking about,” said Mitzi Jonelle Tan from the Philippines, one of the group’s organizers. “What we need now are not empty promises, but annual bind
empowerment & inner transformation... 