Pupils across the world are demanding urgent action to tackle climate change in the second global school strike.
Students in Australia and New Zealand kicked off the day of global youth action, with organisers expecting more than one million children to participate across 110 countries.
It follows the first strike which saw hundreds of children stage demonstrations across the UK as part of a day of global strike action held in March.
In London, students gathered in Parliament Square before marching on the Department for Education.
The strike calls on ministers to “Teach the Future”, by reforming the curriculum to include more material on climate change.
Inspired by 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg, students are also calling for politicians and businesses to help tackle climate change.
Nina Pasqualini, a 13-year-old at a rally in Melbourne, said: “I’m worried about all the weather disasters. Everytime we have huge a bushfire here another animal might go extinct.
“The government isn’t doing as much as it should. It’s just scary for younger generations,” she told Reuters, holding up a placard seeking to stop a proposed new coal mine in Australia.
Global warming due to heat-trapping greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels has brought more droughts and heatwaves, melting of glaciers, rising sea levels and devastating floods, scientists say.
Last year, global carbon emissions hit a record high, despite a warning from the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October that output of the gases will have to be slashed over the next 12 years to stabilise the climate.
Against a backdrop of elections to the European Parliament, which began on Thursday, school strikers in Frankfurt plan to march on the headquarters of the European Central Bank to demand that it stop financing the fossil fuel industry.
The ECB says its mandate is to control inflation and not to favour certain market sectors over others.
Since Thunberg began a singlehanded climate protest outside the Swedish parliament in August, the Fridays for Future school strike movement has grown exponentially.
Groups inspired by her example rapidly clustering into larger, self-organising networks connected across time zones by social media.