On 8 October, the UN announced that we had 12 years left before the damage of climate change would become irreversible.
I was 14, and to me, 12 years felt like both a massive amount of time, and not nearly enough. Twelve years was most of my life, the entirety of my sister’s life.
It’s difficult to imagine the scale of the problem we are facing; 200 years of carbon emissions that have built up undisturbed - and we were just told that we have only 12 years to fix it.
It sounds impossible and, from the reaction of governments around the world, you would think it was.
The lack of response from them implies inevitability, that we may as well sit back and watch the effects of climate change until eventually humanity ceases to exist and their problems disappear alongside them.
But that’s not what they meant when they said 12 years. It wasn’t meant to be a reassurance for the years and years of incompetence, it wasn’t meant to be a way of justifying the lack of action; it was intended as a wake up call, a way of telling these politicians that they have been ignoring the impacts of climate change for too long.
Twelve years was a way of showing the urgency of the crisis we’re facing and yet despite that, little has changed.
Students aren’t striking because we want to miss school, we’re not looking for an excuse to complain. We are striking because we care. Because it is our futures at stake. Because we have the most to lose of any generation. And because we are being ignored!
We are being overlooked and betrayed by the people in power because we are young. And yes, today I can’t vote, but in three years time I can. And I intend to vote for people who show that they care as well.
Climate change is not a new problem. It’s not a recent discovery. It’s something we’ve known about for decades. So why is it that we hear nothing about it from politicians? Why is it that students are not taught about it properly in schools? Why is it that we have come to the point where a strike is the only way we can get our voices heard?
When people ask me why I strike, when they tell me I’d be better off in school, I agree with them. Students should be in classrooms. Climate change is not a problem that we caused, it’s not our responsibility to fix. But while the adults act like children, the children must be the adults. If we want a future we need to act now! We shouldn’t have to sacrifice our education to protect our future. But we do. And we must.
As long as there are governments who refuse to listen to us and act upon what we say, as long as there are corporations who are operating without regulations on their emissions, as long as there are children not being taught about climate change in schools, as long as sea levels keep rising, forests keep burning, rivers keep flooding, as long as all these things continue to happen, we will continue to speak up against them. We will continue to strike. We will continue to protest. And we do this in the hope that one day, our leaders, the people who represent us on the global stage, will hear the message behind our strikes and will take the action that is needed for our future.