greta thunberg brief biography

Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who has received worldwide recognition for her efforts to fight climate change.

Who Is Greta Thunberg?

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who sparked an international movement to fight climate change beginning in 2018. With the simple message "School strike for climate" handwritten on poster board, Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays and protesting outside the Swedish Parliament. Thanks to social media, her actions have spread and influenced millions of young people all over the world to organize and protest.

Launching "Fridays For Future," Thunberg and other concerned youths throughout Europe have continued to pressure leaders and lawmakers to act on climate change through their regular walkouts. Thunberg has also traveled the world, meeting with global leaders and speaking at assemblies to demand climate solutions and a recommitment to the Paris Agreement. Recently diagnosed with Asperger's, the activist has publicly shared her views on her disorder, referring to it as her "superpower."

Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in March 2019, and a few months later she became the youngest individual ever to be honored as Time 's Person of the Year.

Thunberg was born on January 3, 2003, in Stockholm, Sweden. Thunberg began her climate activism at age 15. Thunberg was born and raised in an artistic family. Her mother, Malena Ernman, is an opera singer, and her father, Svante Thunberg, is an actor. She has a younger sister, Beata, who is a popular singer in Sweden. Like her sister, Beata has been open about her own challenges dealing with disorders like ADHD and OCD.

Climate Activism

Thunberg was only eight when she first learned about the climate crisis. Since then, she has made efforts to lower her carbon footprint by not flying and becoming vegan and has influenced her family to do the same.

"You are not mature enough to tell it like is," she said at the summit, addressing the Secretary-General. "Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet."

Cross-Atlantic Trip to the United States

Invited to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, which took place in September 2019, Thunberg traveled across the Atlantic on a zero-emissions yacht, accompanied by her father and a supporting crew. Taking a little over two weeks, the yacht arrived in New York City on August 28th, and from there, Thunberg visited with President Barack Obama and later spoke before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Select Committee in Washington D.C. on September 18th.

Known for her blunt speaking style, Thunberg barely spoke before the committees and instead pushed forward the latest UN report. "I don't want you to listen to me," she said. "I want you to listen to the scientists."

Historical Climate-Change Protest in NYC

Two days later on September 20th, Thunberg walked with millions of protesters in New York City to demand climate action at the New York City Global Climate Strike. The demonstration became the largest climate protest in history with a total of 4 million people marching all over the world. The next day, she spoke at the UN Youth Climate Summit.

United Nations Climate Action Summit, 'How Dare You' Speech

Although the world's eyes were already on the teen activist, her speech on September 21, 2019, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit brought headline news. Speaking before leaders, lawmakers and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Thunberg lambasted them with one of her most indignant speeches.

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing," she said. "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"

She added: "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight... You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."

Days later, Thunberg joined 15 other young climate activists to file an official complaint that five countries — Argentina, France, Germany, Brazil and Turkey — have not honored their Paris Agreement pledges and have therefore violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty.

President Trump's Response

Thunberg's "How Dare You" speech attracted so much attention that President Donald Trump , a vehement climate change denier, felt compelled to offer a mocking tweet: "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" he wrote.

In response, Thunberg changed her Twitter bio temporarily, using Trump's language against him. Her profile read: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

In December 2019, Thunberg was among the speakers at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain. She also attended another major climate demonstration in the city, telling her fellow protesters, "The hope is not within the walls of COP25; the hope is out here with you."

Nobel Peace Prize Nomination

In March 2019, Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her climate activism. However, she lost the award to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

'Time' Person of the Year

On December 11, 2019, Thunberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year; a month shy of her 17th birthday, she became the youngest individual to earn the honor.

"Thunberg has become the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet," wrote the Time editor-in-chief. "This was the year the climate crisis went from behind the curtain to center stage, from ambient political noise to squarely on the world's agenda, and no one did more to make that happen than Thunberg.

Future Plans

Taking a year off of school to campaign for climate action, Thunberg plans to travel to Mexico, Canada and South America to meet with environmental activists and see firsthand the regions most affected by climate change.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 2003
• Birth date: January 3, 2003
• Birth City: Stockholm
• Birth Country: Sweden
• Best Known For: Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who has received worldwide recognition for her efforts to fight climate change.
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Greta Thunberg Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/greta-thunberg
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 10, 2021
• Original Published Date: November 4, 2019
• You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
• For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
• We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.
• People are underestimating the force of angry kids. If they want us to stop being angry, then maybe they should stop making us angry.
• The planet is outside its comfort zone and we also need to be outside of our comfort zone to prevent the worst consequences from happening.
• My role is to be one of many, many activists who are pushing for climate action. I don’t see myself as a leader, or icon or the face of a movement.

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Greta Thunberg: Who is the climate activist and what has she achieved?

• Published 5 February

Greta Thunberg is one of the world's best-known climate change campaigners.

The 21-year-old has been credited with raising public awareness, especially amongst young people

Who is Greta Thunberg and how did she become a climate activist?

Ms Thunberg was born in the Swedish capital Stockholm in 2003. Her mother Malena Ernman is an opera singer, and her father Svante Thunberg is an actor.

She first learned about climate change when she was eight.

When she was 11 or 12, she started suffering from depression, according to her father, Svante.

"She stopped talking... she stopped going to school," he said.

Around the same time she was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.

In summer 2018, aged 15, Ms Thunberg held the first "School Strike for Climate" outside the Swedish parliament.

The protest was widely covered, and hundreds of thousands of young people across the world joined her Fridays For Future strikes .

Mr Thunberg says his daughter became "much happier" after she started campaigning.

She has described her autism diagnosis as a "superpower" which helped motivate her protests.

"Being different is a gift," she told the BBC . "If I would've been like everyone else, I wouldn't have started this school strike."

Between 2019 and 2020, she took a year out of school to concentrate on activism, and became famous for her impassioned speeches to world leaders.

She left school in summer 2023, and ended her school climate strikes .

• Thunberg's father: 'Greta is happy, but I worry'
• A really simple guide to climate change

What have been her most famous speeches?

In April 2019, aged 16, Ms Thunberg told members of the European Parliament : "Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly, because at the moment they are not."

Five months later, she sailed by yacht across the Atlantic to address a UN climate action summit in New York .

"I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean," she told delegates. "Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."

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WATCH: Greta gives a passionate speech to world leaders

Speaking at a youth protest in Glasgow in 2021, after the city hosted the COP26 climate change summit, she said: "[World leaders have held] 26 COPs. They have had decades of blah, blah, blah - and where has that got us?"

• What Greta Thunberg did with her year off school

What court cases has Greta been involved in?

On 1 February 2024, Ms Thunberg was found not guilty of breaking the law by refusing to follow police instructions to move on during a climate protest.

She and four others had been arrested the previous October , but the trial judge said there was "no evidence" of an offence.

In 2023, she was twice arrested at the port of Malmo in Sweden while blocking a road used for transporting oil.

In July of that year, a court fined her 2,500 krona ($240; £187) and in October, she was fined 2,250 krona ($206; £168) .

What awards has Greta Thunberg won?

Ms Thunberg has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year between 2019 and 2023.

In 2019, she became the youngest-ever Time Person of the Year .

Also in 2019, she won the Right Livelihood Award (known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) and Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience Award, and was listed by Forbes as one of the world's 100 most powerful women.

In 2022, she brought out The Climate Book, which contains essays from 100 scientists, writers and activists about how to combat the climate crisis.

What have Greta Thunberg's critics said about her?

At the start of 2023, controversial media personality Andrew Tate baited Ms Thunberg on X, formerly Twitter, by listing his 33 cars and offering to send her details of their "enormous emissions" .

She responded with a sarcastic tweet which was liked by several million people and shared widely.

She was also mocked on Twitter by former US President Donald Trump when she won the Time magazine award. He said: "Greta must work on her Anger Management problem... Chill Greta, Chill!" .

Russian President Vladimir Putin described her as a "kind, but poorly informed, teenager".

• Greta defends herself against trolls

What has Greta Thunberg's campaigning achieved?

Although Ms Thunberg has not devised any specific environmental strategies, she is credited with raising public awareness of climate change across the world, especially amongst young people.

Many commentators call this "the Greta effect".

Broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough told her : "You have aroused the world. I'm very grateful to you."

• 'Greta effect' sees young people making voices heard online

Related Topics

• Greta Thunberg
• Schools' climate change protests

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Greta Thunberg facts!

Discover how a young eco-activist from sweden inspired a global movement….

Meet the teenager whose one-person protest sparked a worldwide climate revolution! Discover more about this young eco-hero in our top ten Greta Thunberg facts…

Who is Greta Thunberg?

1) Greta Thunberg is an environmental activist. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003. When she was eight, she started learning about climate change. The more she learned, the more baffled she became as to why so little was being done about it.

2) At the age of 11, Greta became so sad about climate change that she temporarily stopped speaking!

3) Greta has Asperger syndrome, a condition that affects how people socialise. But Greta views her condition as a positive, calling it her “superpower”! She says it helps her see the world in black and white, and that there are “no grey areas when it comes to climate change.”

4) In August 2018, Greta decided to take action. Instead of going to school, she made a large sign that read ‘ SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE ’, and calmly sat down outside the Swedish parliament. Her aim? To make politicians take notice and act to stop global warming. 

5) Greta was inspired by teenage activists in Florida, USA, who were protesting to end gun violence. Read more about the School Strike for Climate protests that Greta inspired!

6) Greta’s strike was picked up by the Swedish media, and the word started to spread. Soon enough, tens of thousands of students from around the world joined her #FridaysforFuture strikes – skipping school on Fridays to protest against climate change.

7) In March 2019, climate campaigners across the world, and inspired by Greta, came together to co-ordinate the first Global Strike for Climate. It was huge – over 1.6 million people from 125 countries took part! There are further global strikes planned for September this year.

8) Since her strike began, Greta’s life has become a whirlwind! She’s given rousing speeches to politicians, to the EU parliament, the UK parliament, to protesters and more. She’s appeared in documentaries and had loads of books and articles written about her. She’s even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize! 

9) In August 2019, Greta travelled on a wind and solar-powered boat from Plymouth, UK, to New York, USA – the journey took 15 days! Greta will be at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, where she’ll demand action from world leaders.

10) Greta has named Rosa Parks , the civil rights activist, as one of her greatest inspirations. In the 1950s, Rosa sparked a civil rights movement that improved the lives and treatment of millions of African Americans.

What do you think of our Greta Thunberg facts? Let us know by leaving a comment, below!

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WELL DONE, YOUR COMMENT HAS BEEN ADDED!

I think we should take action and do our part to save our world. ✊

i feel like this is something that the world needs to see

this is so cool of what she did!

Let's take action!

that was a very interesting article

thanks this helped me with my homework

were learning about greta!

lets take action

greta is a big caring girl with a big heart

thos ws helpfull

Cool I can not wait for an other story

great stuff

Cool beans such a inspiration! Greta is a true notable!

she is so cool!!

I’m making signs and trying too help you too help save the world.

she Is a really good person because she wants to save the planet.

So amazing what kids and girls can do!

So amazing what kidz can do especially grlz

wow thanks Greta your helping the world with a simple sign

lets take acton now while we can

i hope people realise that climate change isnt something u can forget

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lets help greta Thunberg save the ocean

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Greta has inspired me to take action!

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We have to stop global warming !!!

Save the enviroment!

lets take action!

Thanks for the great info.

that is interesting

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Amelia Tait

Greta Thunberg: How one teenager became the voice of the planet

When Greta Thunberg first downloaded Instagram in June 2018, the Swedish schoolgirl used the app to post pictures of herself posing with her rescue dog, Roxy. There was Roxy in the snow, Roxy at sunset, even Roxy at an open-air theatre. It was an ordinary 15-year-old girl’s Instagram in many ways, though there were hints – a photo of homegrown tomatoes, multiple shots of fields and lakes – that Thunberg was passionate about the natural world. Indeed, just a month before, she had won a climate change essay competition run by Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. “I want to feel safe,” she wrote. “How can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in human history?”

At the age of 12, Thunberg gave up meat and stopped taking flights, in order to lessen her impact on the climate. In her early teens she became depressed and spent time off school, partly because of her fears about global warming. Then, in the summer of 2018, she became distressed again when heatwaves and wildfires spread across Sweden.

On August 20, 2018, Thunberg posted a picture of herself sitting outside Sweden’s parliament building, the Riksdag. “We children don’t usually do what you grown-ups tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you don’t give a shit about my future. I don’t give a shit either,” she captioned an image of herself in leopard print trousers and a blue hoodie, sat on the ground in Stockholm, a stray cigarette butt resting on the cobbles at her feet. Two-thirds of the frame was filled by a handmade cardboard sign reading, "Skolstrejk för klimatet”.

Thunberg’s plan was to skip school until the Swedish general election on September 9, 2018, in protest against the government’s inaction on climate change. “I was going to sit there and gain media attention on the climate crisis so that people would start talking about it, but then afterwards I thought: why should I stop now?” she says. While Thunberg returned to school for four days of the week after the election, she continued to strike every Friday. And so, #FridaysForFuture was born.

When Thunberg, disturbed after Sweden’s warmest summer, began striking, she initially asked her ­classmates to join her protest. Her immediate peers refused. However, like any self-respecting member of Generation Z, Thunberg cross-posted her original strike photo on both Instagram and Twitter.

Almost instantly, other social media accounts amplified her cause. According to Thunberg, one of her earliest high-profile supporters was Ingmar Rentzhog, a Swedish entrepreneur and environmentalist who arrived at her strike after it was covered by local journalists. He posted pictures of Thunberg on Facebook and Twitter, allowing her cause to spread further. (Thunberg is reported to have cut ties with Rentzhog after allegedly using her name to crowdfund for his company.) Sasja Beslik, head of Group Sustainable Finance at the Finnish bank Nordea, quote-tweeted Thunberg’s post to more than 200,000 followers. Three days later, on August 23, Thunberg tweeted another picture, excitedly writing that “almost 35 people!” had joined her strike.

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“I heard of Greta’s school strike on the afternoon of the first day,” says Mayson Persson, a non-binary trans 15-year-old from Stockholm who goes by they/them pronouns. Persson is politically engaged as a member of RFSL Ungdom, a Swedish youth organisation for LBGTQ+ rights. They say, they saw Thunberg’s post on Instagram after it was amplified by high-profile youth activists.

“The next day, just after 8am, I was there at her side,” Persson says. “I have, for a few years, had an interest in the climate and have chosen to not travel by airplane or eat meat in order to lessen my impact on the climate. I joined Greta because youths are strong but we are even stronger together.” At lunchtime, a handful more people joined the strike.

“Social media can be very effective in creating movements,” says Thurnberg. “In the beginning, that is how I first got attention. That is when journalists started coming.” Thunberg quickly attracted local reporters, going on to earn international coverage in just over a week.

On October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dire statement: a failure to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, it said, was likely to result in fires, floods and famines. “We don’t fall over a cliff at 1.5°C or by the year 2030,” says Jim Skea, an IPCC co-chair. He explains that while the media ran headlines about 12 years to save the planet, the report itself said 1.5°C warming would be hit between 2030 and 2052. The IPCC found that at 1.5°C warming, crop yields and livestock would be affected by rising temperatures, leading to food insecurity and poverty. “The IPCC is not an advocacy organisation, so it doesn’t say yes or no to a particular level of warming,” Skea says. “We can identify the implications, but we don’t actually advocate for it.”

Regardless, immediate action was needed to prevent an irreversible climate catastrophe, but while the scientists couched their findings in “ifs”, “buts” and “maybes”, one 16-year-old girl didn’t hold back. On October 20, Thunberg addressed 10,000 people gathered in Finland for a climate change prevention march in Helsinki organised by Greenpeace, WWF, and Helsinki University’s student union. On November 24, she gave a TEDxStockholm talk. By then, children in other countries had begun striking as well, using the #FridaysForFuture hashtag to spread their cause. On April 13, 2019, Thunberg posted a picture of Leah, a 14-year-old Ugandan student who skipped school and held up a sign demanding: “#ClimateAction Now!!!”.

In December 2018, Thunberg addressed the United Nations climate change summit, telling world leaders that they were “not mature enough to tell it like is”. This talk became her first real viral video – more than 9.8 million people watched her speech when it was uploaded on the Facebook page for Brut UK, “a video content publisher covering social justice”. On January 22, 2019, she told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that they should be panicking. “Our house is on fire,” she said. “You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5°C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t.”

On Friday, March 15, 2019, more than a million students took part in 2,000 protests in 125 countries, from Albania and Kyrgyzstan to Peru, Thailand and Zambia, in the first Global Climate Strike for Future. In seven months, Thunberg had become a social media celebrity with 1.1m Instagram followers and 400,000 Twitter followers – and the global figurehead for climate action.

On a crisp Friday morning in April 2019, Thunberg sits again outside the Riksdag, wrapped in a large, scuffed purple duffle coat, a cream woollen hat atop her now signature pigtails, and her hands – in mismatched black and grey gloves – resting on her lap. It is her 33rd week of striking. “It is hard to realise how fast it has all spread around to so many people,” she says. “I am so busy now I don’t really have time to sit down and think through what is actually happening.”

Social media was crucial for Greta’s journey because she is, she says, a natural introvert. “Without social media I don’t think it would have worked,” she says. “I just sat down on a school strike. Now I reach millions of people.” Although she has mobilised millions of children around the world, she rarely chats with the kids at her own school. “They do not talk to me that often but that is good because then I am in a free zone where I don’t have to deal with all the attention,” she says. A few years ago, she was diagnosed with selective mutism, an anxiety disorder characterised by an inability to speak in certain situations. “It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention,” she says, “but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.”

In person, Thunberg’s speaking style is identical to that she uses to address the world’s most powerful men: she is straightforward, unemotional, eloquent. She was diagnosed with Asperger’s four years ago, and regards her diagnosis as a “superpower” when it comes to speaking candidly about the climate. The only question that gives her pause – she thinks for five seconds before answering – is: “Do you ever feel like a celebrity?”

“I do not see myself as a celebrity or an icon or things like that… I have not really done anything,” she says. Less than six minutes later, an elderly man in a black anorak kneels down next to Thunberg to say that he has stopped flying, clutching her hand in his. Moments afterwards, two middle-aged women shake her hand and ask for a selfie, a tall Indian man requests a hug (she stoically complies), and a tourist holds out his notebook for an autograph. She writes her name in small, neat, thick black letters at the top of the page and then draws a love heart. When asked if this happens often, she simply says: “Yes”.

Yet, while the tourist couples around Thunberg want selfies, the Swedish schoolchildren gathered nearby want change. Four small children, perhaps between eight and ten, approach Thunberg to chat about their concerns, one clutching four bright orange Post-its full of notes, another waving a poster that says: “Marine life in plastic is not fantastic”. A large group of primary school age later arrive at the strike to rapturous applause; on neon green poster paper one child has written: “Stop global warming” and glued on three memes. In one, a starving polar bear asks: “There’s no such thing as climate change? Oh, good.”

Malin, a 16-year-old from Stockholm sporting devil horns, a blue rain jacket and walking boots, has come to strike with her friend Astrid, 18, for the third Friday in a row. “Greta has been such a leader, and it feels safe to express what I want when someone goes before me,” she says. Nearby, Ester, also 16, is the only student from her school to strike. “I think a lot of it comes from a lack of information,” she says.

“At school we’re taught about climate change and they say ‘this might happen’. I think we need to start making it clear we need to act now. It’s not a hypothetical universe that this is happening to, it’s happening here, and it’s going to affect us, everyone.”

The youngest protester is a five-year-old boy in a raincoat and blue hat who has written a message on A4 paper in a handful of different coloured felt-tip pens. His mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, travelled four hours by train to see Thunberg, and translates his sign. “Don’t cut any trees down, just two a week.” Clutching a jar of honey made by her own bees that she intends to give to Thunberg, the mother calls the teenager “very inspiring”. The crowd in the square comes and goes, but it is clear Thunberg has galvanised people from five to 50

“What do we want?” the protesting children spontaneously begin to chant. “To save the climate.” When do they want it? “Now! Now! Now!”

Greta Thunberg is far from the only child activist calling attention to the climate crisis, nor is she by any means the first. Jamie Margolin is the 17-year-old founder of Zero Hour, a youth-led climate movement established in the US in 2017. Margolin says when she first became an activist at the age of 14 in her home town of Seattle, it was “really, really” difficult to get anyone to pay attention.

“Climate change was barely in the news ever and I felt so alone,” says Margolin, who was motivated to start her movement after smog from over 20 Canadian wildfires blew over to her home city of Seattle, giving her “two weeks of headaches”.

“I’ve had this overwhelming sense of dread ever since I was really little,” Margolin says over Skype from school, while her peers shout, chat and play in the background. Like Thunberg, she can speak at length about the climate – her passion not betrayed by any audible emotion, but by the depth of her knowledge. “Whenever I saw something about climate change on TV, I would just not look at it because it was so scary,” she goes on. “I remember going to the beach in Seattle and the sign said, ‘Don’t feed the seals, don’t feed the otters’. But I never saw any seals or otters.”

Margolin joined local environmental organisations and, alongside other youth activists, sued the state of Washington to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (The case was ultimately dismissed.) “Environmental activism wasn’t like some little extracurricular, it was a full-time job outside of school,” she says now. “With other youth in my state, I was doing the unglamorous, gruelling work of building a movement, and no one was listening.”

Zero Hour aims to “centre the voices of diverse youth in the conversation around climate justice”. Rebecca Raby, a professor of child studies at Canada's Brock University, researches youth activism, and says that minority voices often struggle to gain media attention. Margolin, who is Hispanic, readily acknowledges that she built her movement “on the shoulders” of those who came before her, including the indigenous youth activists who resisted the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. She also acknowledges that Thunberg – who sent her a message on Twitter asking to work with Zero Hour in October 2018 – built upon her work.

“Right now there’s this international climate movement that people are seeing, but the community organising for this has been happening for centuries,” Margolin says. “Even if we don’t directly get the credit or funding or whatever, it’s still amazing to see this movement grow. To be one of the first dominoes to knock this whole thing down is really amazing.”

There are a handful of reasons why Thunberg became the figurehead who mobilised the world’s children. The media impact of the “12 years to save the planet” figure touted in the press just two months after she started striking was, says Skea, “unprecedented” for the IPCC. Thunberg arguably also had pre-existing social capital – her mother is opera singer Malena Ernman, and she retweeted Thunberg’s original strike photo to over 40,000 followers, writing that while she understood the environmental crisis, she encouraged her daughter to go to school. Thunberg’s parents have always been clear that her campaign was entirely her own initiative.

“I followed her mum so that’s where I saw Greta’s first tweet,” says 18-year-old Nora Axelsson Håkanson, who speaks on children’s rights for the Swedish Feminist Initiative party, and joined Thunberg on her second day of striking. “Many people stopped by to tell us that they’d seen the post on Twitter or Facebook and support us,” she says of the early strike. “It all exploded and went viral just over the night.”

Yet beyond Thunberg’s social capital, there are other cultural reasons why adults listened to the solitary schoolgirl. Raby says that while there are many historical examples of youth movements, young people are now mobilising in more significant numbers and across more widespread geographies. The academic says it’s not the case that children are becoming more engaged — the real change is that adults have started paying attention.

“Young people’s views have often been marginalised based on arguments that they don’t know what they are talking about. Recent issues that young people have mobilised about all directly link to their lives and experience,” Raby explains. She adds that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed in the 1990s by Canada, the UK, India and New Zealand among others, means there are more top-down youth initiatives than ever before.

In 2018, one movement in particular inspired children to mobilise in greater numbers than ever before. On Valentine’s Day, a gunman killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Student survivors immediately demanded stricter gun control throughout the US, holding their first rally just three days after the tragedy. Rapidly, a handful of students became household names – Emma González and David Hogg, among others, ultimately led more than 1.2m protesters on the March for Our Lives in Washington, on March 24, 2018. Thunberg cites these marchers as one of the original inspirations for her strike. Hogg and González are now social media celebrities, with a combined total of over 2.5m followers. As teens, they aptly used memes and hashtags to make their movement go viral.

“Social media has played a significant role in recent activism,” says Raby. “While in the past young people and other more marginalised groups had to rely on established news media to publicise their concerns and events, now young people can communicate with each other and with adults directly.”

When it comes to the environment, the children are (what’s left of) the future. Kehkashan Basu is the now 18-year-old founder of the Green Hope Foundation, a member of the World Future Council, and a former co-ordinator of the United Nations Environment Programme. “My first climate action was planting a tree on my eighth birthday, using my gift money. Since that day, I have organised over 15,000 tree plantings across multiple countries,” she says.

At the age of eight, Basu became an activist when she saw a picture on television of a dead bird with “its belly full of plastic”. “Numb” at the thought of the bird’s “agony”, she organised a “no plastic” campaign in her neighbourhood. At 12, she started the Green Hope Foundation in her home city of Dubai. “What began as a dream with a handful of friends back in 2012 is now a global social enterprise with over 1,000 members working at ground level in 12 countries,” she says. The young people in the foundation clean beaches, plant trees, conserve habitats, and give speeches and presentations about global warming.

Basu has since moved from Dubai to Canada, a country with its own famous young environmental activist. At a First Nations meeting in 2016, the then 12-year-old Autumn Peltier confronted Justin Trudeau about his pipeline projects. “I am very unhappy with the choices you’ve made,” she told the Canadian prime minister, referring in part to his approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which could see 980km of pipe pump oil through vulnerable habitats, risking spills in bodies of water such as the Strait of Juan de Fuca, on the British Columbia coast.

“I think when the message comes from youth it has a bigger impact, because we are the future generation, the future leaders,” Peltier, now 14, says. Peltier comes from Wiikwemkoong, a First Nation on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, and says her people have nicknamed her a “water warrior” because of her advocacy. In March 2018, she told the United Nations general assembly to “warrior up” and stop polluting the world’s water.

“People my age are starting to notice how adults are treating the planet,” she says. “There’s a lot of kids that are worrying about our planet and our future, and we’re all just standing up now.”

On April 21, 2019 – after two straight days of train travel – Greta Thunberg came to London. A long queue of people snaked down Euston Road the next day as children and adults alike waited to hear her speak at her first public event in England. Just over a week earlier, the Youth Strike for Climate UK brought traffic to a halt in London. Children waving meme-emblazoned placards chanted outside Downing Street: “Theresa May, hear us say, climate change is here to stay!”

Two days later, Thunberg addressed MPs in the UK parliament, a microphone clipped to her pink-and-black check shirt, her voice and her plaits as unwavering as ever. “I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children,” she said. Two months earlier, Theresa May scolded school strikers for wasting teachers’ time and urged them to return to class. “I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?” Earlier that day, Thunberg met leading Westminster politicians, including Jeremy Corbyn, Vince Cable and Caroline Lucas. A symbolic empty seat was left out for Theresa May. "It was incredibly inspiring to meet Greta and in particular to hear her speak the truth to politicians about the scale and urgency of the climate crisis," says Lucas. "Politicians who fail to respond will be judged by history far less kindly than those striking or taking to the streets over the climate emergency."

It is clear that children’s climate activism is already putting pressure on world leaders to change. In February 2019, striking students in Belgium forced an environment minister to resign after she claimed the protests were a “set up” by adults. In the same month, California senator Dianne Feinstein was criticised for her failure to engage with child activists who were rallying for the Green New Deal.

“When adults say we need to go back to school I feel like they don’t understand the message that we are trying to send,” says Anuna De Wever, the de facto leader of the school strike movement in Belgium. “It’s a message of urgency. Of the fact that we are facing an existential crisis. We literally won’t have a future if we don’t act now. We are the last generation to actually be able to save this world.”

Are there limitations to movements run on social media, where followers and subscribers click "Like" to soothe their own guilt? “It feels like if someone steps behind me then their conscience is clear,” says Thunberg. “If all the people who followed me on social media did something then the world would look very different.” What about limitations to movements run by kids?

“There’s this weird thing where people will pit you as an inspiration, but then they don’t actually do anything about it,” says Zero Hour’s Margolin. “World leaders will be like ‘Oh, you guys are going to change the world’. It’s like, actually, we’re just kids telling you to stop messing up.”

Thunberg readily concurs. “I have spoken to many politicians who ask me ‘What do you think about this?’, and it’s just insane,” she says. “We are not doing this because we have solutions and we want to be the ones in power, we are just messengers. We are just children and we cannot solve this. We cannot wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge because by then it will be too late.” In her speech to the UK parliament, she was not optimistic, noting that despite the strikers' accomplishments, the greenhouse-gas emission curve was still rising.

Yet despite the naysayers, many other politicians and powerful people already back the #FridaysForFuture strikers. Angela Merkel says she welcomes the protesters, while Norwegian Socialist Left MP Freddy André Øvstegård nominated Thunberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. “We need to recognise this new movement and enhance the momentum for change,” he says now. “She deserves the prize.”

Scientists, too, back the youth activists – in March 2019, more than 12,000 of them signed a letter in support of the youth protests. “She and her colleagues have great moral authority – they’ll have to live with these changes all their lives,” says climate scholar Bill McKibben. “They can call on the rest of us to act, and they have. And I think many people will choose to answer.”

Whether that is true remains to be seen, but Thunberg is cautiously optimistic. When asked why so many people are blind to the realities of the climate crisis, her answer is simple. “I do not think they are evil,” she says. “I just think that they are not informed.”

Thunberg is part of a long history of child activists – in 1990, TIME ran an article about “ecokids”, a “new generation” of environmentally active schoolchildren. Thunberg is not naive about her place in this narrative, and understands newer and fresher faces may replace her as the media’s favourite young activist. “I am not going to be this interesting for long,” she says. “This attention is soon going to fade out, but I just hope that the attention sticks to the movement.”

Before Thunberg inspired one million school students to protest about climate inaction on March 15, 2019, she wanted to be an astronaut. Or an actor. Or a singer, scientist, farmer, policewoman, politician or doctor. “It is so hard to find something and decide what I want because I want to do so much,” she says. “But I realised that if you don’t care about the climate then the other things won’t matter in the future.”

Thunberg is neither hopeful nor pessimistic about the future of our planet – she is firmly grounded in the present, trying to change what she can now. “I have just decided that I will do this even if there is no hope. Not having hope is not an excuse for not doing something,” she says. “Everyone says different things. Some say we are already screwed and some say we still have time.” Her message, as always, is calm and clear. “I just hope that this movement will continue and we do something about the climate – because that is the only thing that matters.”

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Kathy Gilsinan

David Kushner

Jenna Scatena

Rachel Lance

Greta Thunberg turns 17 today. Here's how she started a global climate movement in just 18 months.

• Greta Thunberg , a teenage activist from Sweden who has become the face of the youth climate movement, turns 17 today.
• In the summer of 2018, Thunberg started sitting outside the Swedish parliament every Friday as part of a climate strike. On September 20, 2019, Thunberg led the largest climate strike in history .
• Thunberg has addressed the United Nations , US Congress, and UK Parliament.
• In December, Time magazine named her the 2019 person of the year .
• Here's how she rose to prominence in just 18 months.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

Today, the world's most prominent climate activist turns 17.

In the last 18 months, Greta Thunberg "has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change," the editors of Time wrote in December, when they named her the magazine's 2019 person of the year.

Thunberg launched the "Fridays For Future" movement — or School Strike for Climate (as it says in Swedish on her now-famous sign) — in 2018, encouraging students to skip school to demand action on climate change from their governments. That November, when she was in ninth grade, Thunberg staged a two-week strike outside the Swedish parliament, demanding that her government cut emissions by 15% a year.

She still spends every Friday on strike; Thunberg is on week 72, according to her Twitter . 

In September, 4 million people joined her in that strike across 161 countries — the largest climate demonstration in history. Following that day of action, Thunberg gave an impassioned, tearful speech to world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean," she said with tears in her eyes. "Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."

Here's how Thunberg rose to prominence as the face of a new movement.

"She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not," Time magazine wrote of Thunberg last month.

In response to Time's recognition, Thunberg tweeted : "Wow, this is unbelievable! I share this great honour with everyone in the #FridaysForFuture movement and climate activists everywhere."

Thunberg has been thinking about climate change — and the lack of action to curb it — since age 8. She has said she didn't understand why adults weren't working to mitigate its effects.

By age 11, Thunberg said, she became depressed by the seemingly impossible task of saving the planet.

In May 2018, Thunberg won a climate-change essay competition for the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. That was the genesis of her activism career . She started the School Strike for Climate effort three months later and launched her first protest three months after that.

Thunberg partially credits her Asperger's syndrome for her fierce activist nature.

In an interview with BBC journalist Nick Robinson, Thunberg said that "being different is a gift."

If she didn't have Asperger's, Thunberg added, she wouldn't have become such a passionate activist. Thunberg has also tweeted about her condition , saying that Asperger's is a "superpower."

In December 2018, Thunberg spoke at the United Nations climate-change conference in Katowice, Poland.

"This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced," she told UN secretary general António Guterres before that conference started . "First we have to realize this and then as fast as possible do something to stop the emissions and try to save what we can save."

Three months later, in March 2019, Thunberg led more than 1 million students around the world as they walked out of Friday classes to protest inaction on climate change.

Young people in  more than  123 countries  skipped school to demand more robust climate policies and the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.

"We have only been born into this world. We are going to have to live with this crisis our whole lives," Thunberg said in a speech in Stockholm during that global event.

"We are not going to accept this. We are striking because we want a future and we are going to carry on," Thunberg added, according to Reuters. 

Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in March 2019.

She "has launched a mass movement, which I see as a major contribution to peace," Norwegian MP Freddy André Øvstegård told The Guardian at the time . "We have proposed Greta Thunberg because if we do nothing to halt climate change it will be the cause of wars, conflict, and refugees."

In the end, the award went to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who brokered peace between his nation and Eritrea.

A month later, Thunberg spoke with Pope Francis during the weekly general audience at the Vatican.

The Pope strongly supports action to curb climate change.

"Thank you for standing up for the climate and speaking the truth. It means a lot," Thunberg told him in April 2019.

"God bless you, continue to work, continue. Go along, go ahead," he responded.

A week after that, Thunberg told UK parliament leaders: "Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future."

Thunberg has also met with UN leaders on numerous occasions and visited the French parliament as well.

Because air travel has a heavy carbon footprint, Thunberg refuses to fly. In Europe, she typically travels by train. But getting to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019 posed a new challenge.

A single round-trip flight between New York and California generates roughly 20% of the greenhouse gases your car emits in a year.

Thunberg enlisted the help of Boris Herrmann, who captains a schooner called Malizia II. The ship runs on solar power and underwater turbines (in addition to wind, of course), thereby emitting no carbon.

She completed the 13-day, cross-Atlantic journey with her father Svante, professional sailors Boris Herrmann and Pierre Casiraghi, and filmmaker Nathan Grossman in August.

While in the US, Thunberg sat down with Barack Obama.

"Just 16, @GretaThunberg is already one of our planet's greatest advocates," Obama tweeted after their meeting .

She also met with members of the US House of Representatives to discuss climate-change policies. Instead of a prepared speech, Thunberg simply submitted a 2018 UN climate report.

Thunberg's remarks at the hearing lasted less than one minute .

"I don't want you to listen to me," she said. "I want you to listen to the scientists."

On September 20, 2019, Thunberg led a worldwide climate strike that included 4 million people across 161 countries.

Adults joined the ranks of young protesters in most major cities around the world. It was the biggest climate-change protest in history .

"We showed that we are united and we young people are unstoppable," Thunberg said the following day.

At the UN Climate Action Summit a few days later, Thunberg chastised world leaders with tears in her eyes: "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight," she said.

After that speech, Thunberg joined 15 other young people from around the world to file a legal complaint alleging that five countries' inaction on global warming violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The complaint was filed against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey.

The UN treaty is 30 years old; children have been able to file legal complaints to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child since 2014.

Thunberg spent the next couple of months traveling throughout the US and Canada, meeting climate activists and environmental protesters.

Thunberg had planned to travel to Santiago, Chile to attend the COP25 climate conference last month, but the event was moved at the last minute to Madrid, Spain.

So Thunberg hitched an impromptu cross-Atlantic ride with an Australian couple, their 11-month-old son, and a professional sailor in November.

The boat arrived in Lisbon, Portugal on December 3, and Thunberg made it to Madrid on December 6, just in time for her speaking commitments at COP25 .

On December 11, Thunberg addressed climate scientists in Madrid. "I am telling you there is hope. I have seen it. But it does not come from governments or corporations. It comes from the people," she said.

Thunberg added : "We do not have to wait. We can start the change right now. We the people."

Ivan De Luce contributed to a previous version of this story.

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• TED Speaker

Greta Thunberg

Why you should listen.

In August 2018, Greta Thunberg started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world and now involves over 100,000 schoolchildren. The movement is now called Fridays For Future. 

Thunberg has spoken at climate rallies in Stockholm, Helsinki, Brussels and London. In December 2018 she attended the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she addressed the Secretary-General and made a plenary speech that went viral and was shared many million times around the globe. In January 2019, she was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos where her speeches again made a worldwide impact.

Thunberg tries to live a low-carbon life. Therefore she is vegan, and she doesn't fly. In 2019, TIME magazine named her  Person of the Year  as well as one of the world's  100 most influential people . 

Greta Thunberg’s TED talk

The disarming case to act right now on climate change

More news and ideas from greta thunberg, a new malaria vaccine begins testing in malawi and more ted news.

The TED community is brimming with new projects and updates. Below, a few highlights. Malaria vaccine begins wide-scale testing in Malawi. RTS,S — the only malaria vaccine to successfully pass clinical trials — will be made available to 360,000 children in Kenya, Malawi and Ghana in the first round of implementation testing. Immunologist Faith Osier […]

A new mission to mobilize 2 million women in US politics … and more TED news

TED2019 may be past, but the TED community is busy as ever. Below, a few highlights. Amplifying 2 million women across the U.S. Activist Ai-jen Poo, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and Planned Parenthood past president Cecile Richards have joined forces to launch Supermajority, which aims to train 2 million women in the United […]

Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize and other TED news

The TED community is brimming with new projects and ideas. Below, a few highlights. Youth climate change protests kick off across the world. Students from 112 countries skipped school in mid-March to join climate activist Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate demanding government action on climate change. The global event was part of the Fridays […]

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Greta Thunberg: ‘I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters’

Greta thunberg has spent three years raising the alarm on the climate crisis, her mission could end up saving the world, it's already saved her.

The transformation of Greta Thunberg Words: Simon Hattenstone Portraits: Marcus Ohlsson

Sat 25 Sep 2021 08.00 BST

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Greta Thunberg has made the ultimate sacrifice for the Guardian. She’s allowed us to turn her into a human oil spillage. The treacly black stuff is dripping from her hair, down her nose, past her cheeks on to her neck and shoulders.nose, past her cheeks on to her neck and shoulders.

Down, down, down it drips. By the time we speak on Zoom, a day later, she has just about got herself cleaned up. Has she ever been covered in oil before? (It’s actually a mixture of non-toxic finger paint and olive oil.) “No,” she says. This is a typical Thunberg answer – short, factual, to the point. She never likes to waste her words. How did it feel? “It felt better than I thought it would feel. I had a ribbon on my hair to not get my hair black, but then it spilt through the ribbon so my hair was completely black. It was very difficult to get off.” I suggest that she sues the Guardian. “Yes,” she says. Thunberg isn’t smiling.

We talk first thing on a Sunday. Look at Thunberg and she seems little changed – still elfin-like and earnest; still quoting the climate science with fastidious politeness; and still with that curious mix of pessimism (we’re doomed if we don’t act) and optimism (we can avert catastrophe if we do). But, as she relaxes, I begin to discover that this is a very different Thunberg from the one she presented to the public in 2018. While she has done much to change our perspective of the world, the world has done much to change her – and, she says, for the better. Despite the climate crisis deepening by the day, Greta Thunberg has learned how to be happy.

Like the rest of us she has retreated from the world over the past year and a half, but she has used her time to good effect – to grow up. Thunberg is now 18 years old and campaigning as ferociously as ever, while living in her own apartment (where she is speaking from), hanging out with friends and having fun. She is turning into the kind of young woman that neither she nor her parents could have ever envisaged.

At home in Stockholm, she says, she goes unnoticed. “Fortunately I live in Sweden, which is very good because people aren’t interested in ‘celebrities’. When I do get stopped, it’s mostly tourists and people from abroad.”

Her father, Svante, talking to me from the family home, tells a funny story about the time he and Greta attended a climate exhibition in the Swedish capital. “She was the main part of the exhibition. There was a big picture of her taken in North Dakota, hanging in the middle of the hallway, five metres tall. No one came up to her. When we left, someone came up with an iPad. I thought, ‘OK, maybe someone wants an autograph’ and the woman said, ‘Excuse me, we’re doing a survey for the museum.’ That sums up how people treat her in Stockholm. They’re not very impressed, and I think that’s good for her. No one really gives a damn.”

Locals may not give a damn, but I discover later on that plenty of other people do – sometimes in a way that has threatened the safety of Thunberg and her family.

I might be naive because I’m very young. But naivety and childishness are sometimes a good thing

Three years ago Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg was an unknown 15-year-old terrified that we were destroying the planet and furious that adults were letting it happen. Her fury was particularly directed at those with power. She decided to take unilateral action, and tweeted her plan. “We kids most often don’t do what you tell us to do. We do as you do. And since you grownups don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either. My name is Greta and I’m in ninth grade. And I am school striking for the climate until election day.” She didn’t expect anyone to take notice. Thunberg had spent her short lifetime not being noticed. She was small, rarely spoke and described herself as “that girl in the back who never said anything”.

Thunberg spent the first day sitting cross-legged on her own outside the Swedish parliament alongside a sign made from wood scrap that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (“School strike for climate”). Although she was striking, she still treated it as a regular school day – she rode to the Riksdag on her bike, took out her books and studied till the end of the school day. The next week a few others joined her – fellow students, teachers and parents – and her campaign began to attract media interest. In September 2018 she began a regular Friday strike, calling it Fridays for Future, encouraging other students to join her. By March 2019, her protest had spread to more than 70 countries. On 20 September 2019, 4 million people joined a school strike across 161 countries – the largest climate demonstration in history.

Within a year, Thunberg had become one of the most famous people on Earth. Since then she has been nominated twice for the Nobel peace prize, addressed the UN and been thanked by the pope. Liberal world leaders suck up to her to show their people they take the climate crisis seriously, rightwing populist leaders mock her to show that they don’t. November’s Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow is due to be attended by more than 200 nations, and will be one of the largest gatherings of world leaders in history. But many people only want to hear from one person – the autistic teenager with the pigtails.

Perhaps the biggest change in Thunberg is her faith in people. When she started out, she didn’t have any. “I didn’t think young people cared about climate because all the young people I knew were like, ‘Oh yeah, the climate is important, but I don’t want to do anything about it.’ But it turned out many young people around the world actually care. A lot! And they are very ready to do something about it. I’m very glad I was proven wrong.”

She talks about the activists she has met, and how they have inspired her. For the first time in her life, she was meeting people who shared her passion – or obsession. I had met one of her fellow Fridays for Future activists a couple of weeks ago – Vanessa Nakate, Uganda’s first school striker. Thunberg’s face lights up when I mention her. “Vanessa is an incredible person.” She draws such strength from people like Nakate, she says, because they are taking greater risks than she has ever had to.

“Some places are much harder to be an activist in than others. I look up to them so much. They give me the hope and inspiration to carry on.” She pauses. “Of course, I might be naive because I’m very young.” She pauses again. “But I think naivety and childishness are sometimes a good thing.” The great thing about youth, she says, is you’re not blinded by realpolitik and the assumption of compromise. “I do think older people make things more complicated than they actually are.”

Is there a sense of solidarity between fellow activists? “Definitely. We have daily contact. We don’t just campaign together, we are also friends. My best friends are within the climate movement.” I ask if she could ever be friends with a climate denier. “Erm, yeaaaah,” she says uncertainly. “I mean in one way we’re all climate deniers because we’re not acting as if it is a crisis. I don’t know. It depends on the situation.” So there’s hope for your friendship with Donald Trump? She lets out a hiccup of laughter. “Well, I don’t think we would enjoy each other’s company that much. We have very different interests.” In 2019, when Thunberg was crowned Time magazine’s person of the year, Trump tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Eleven months later, with Trump demanding a recount, having lost the election to Joe Biden, Thunberg coolly tweeted: “So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”

She is still thinking about the question of befriending a climate denier. The funny thing is, she says, she used to be in denial herself. “When I first heard about it, I didn’t think it was real because if it was real, people would do something about it. It didn’t add up to me.”

Then, aged eight, she was shown a film of an armada of plastic assailing our oceans. She couldn’t get it out of her head. She started to read about it, and became more and more terrified. She was exceptionally bright, with a photographic memory, but was also withdrawn and quiet. And she was becoming more so.

At the age of 11 she fell into a deep depression and stopped eating and talking. Why does she think she was so unhappy? “One of the reasons was I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that people didn’t seem to care about anything, that everyone just cared about themselves rather than everything that was happening with the world. And being an oversensitive child with autism, it was definitely something I thought about a lot, and it made me sad.” Was it also because she had been bullied at school? “Yeah, to some extent.”

I ask if she literally stopped talking. “I spoke to my parents, my sister and a bit to my teacher,” she says. Why did she stop? “I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”

I mean in one way we’re all climate deniers because we’re not acting as if it is a crisis

Svante tells me it was terrifying. “It was complete hell; a nightmare for me and my wife. We took all the time in the world to be with her and sort this out, and that was the best thing we’ve done in our lives.”

Svante and the opera singer Malena Ernman have two children: Greta and her sister, Beata, who is three years younger. When Greta was born, Malena’s career was taking off, so Svante – who had trained as an actor – stayed at home to look after the children. By the time they started school, Malena was touring internationally. Svante started a production company and looked after her work. But when Greta fell ill, he became a stay-at-home dad again, monitoring everything she ate (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours”) and her dramatic weight loss, and talking her through her fears. That was when he discovered that so much of it was rooted in the climate crisis.

It amuses him when he reads that it was he and Malena who turned her into a climate activist. Svante says that Malena was an activist but she campaigned for refugees (and they had refugees living with them) rather than the environment. The only aspiration he had for Greta back then was for her to get better. As for himself, he knew little about the climate crisis, wasn’t convinced by what he did know and just wanted to get a nice big car – an SUV or pick-up truck. Over time, Greta changed his mind.

“The way she got us interested was a bit by force. She hijacked us. She started turning off lights. She cut the electricity bill in half.” He laughs. “She’d say, ‘Why have you got the lights on in this room, you’re not even in here?’ and I’d say, ‘Because we live in a country where it’s dark all the time and it makes me feel nice’ and she’d say, ‘Why? It doesn’t make any sense.’ Of course, she was right.”

Did he get pissed off with her? “Oh hell, yeah. She can be very, very, very annoying. But because we were in this crisis we had to react, so we became aware and began to do stuff for the environment, but not because we wanted to save the environment; we did it to save our child.”

At the time, Beata had also been diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, and the family was imploding. Malena and Svante wrote a book about this period, with the Bergmanesque title Scenes from the Heart. It was published on 23 August 2018, three days after Greta’s first school strike. Svante says the timing couldn’t have been worse. “It was a hell of a nuisance when she decided to do the strike because it left us in a tricky situation.” Why? “It was obvious everyone would say you’ve written this book and she’s going on school strike as a PR stunt. But she had made up her mind she was going on strike, so we thought the only thing we could do was give every cent away. All our earnings from the book went to charity.”

In the book, Malena describes how the 11-year-old Greta was “slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and, little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking … She stopped eating.” They were, she concluded, “burned-out people on a burned-out planet”. An updated version of the book was published last year in the UK, retitled Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, this time with contributions from the girls, and the whole family credited as authors. Malena explained why she had felt compelled to write it in the first place. “Because we felt like shit. I felt like shit. Svante felt like shit. The children felt like shit. The planet felt like shit. Even the dog felt like shit,” she wrote. Svante says hardly anybody bought either version of the book because they decided not to promote it.

I ask Thunberg how important her family’s support has been. “In the beginning they didn’t like the idea of me skipping school, but then they helped more, arranging trips. My dad even followed me on some.” They made huge sacrifices for you, I say. “Yep. They changed their lifestyles. My mum stopped flying, and by doing that she stopped her international career, and I really appreciate it.”

Does she feel guilty about stymying her mother’s career? She seems surprised by the question. “It was her choice. I didn’t make her do anything. I just provided her with the information to base her decision on.” At times like this you can see how unyielding she is – while it’s the source of her strength, you can imagine just how tough it may have been for her parents. “Of course, you could argue one person’s career is not more important than the climate, but to her it was a very big thing,” she says.

Thunberg was at home with her father for a year. By the time she was ready to return to school (initially a specialist autism school, then grammar school), she had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, obsessive compulsive disorder and selective mutism. Thunberg says the diagnosis came as a relief. “When I felt the most sad, I didn’t know that I had autism. I just thought, I don’t want to be like this. The diagnosis was almost only positive for me. It helped me get the support I needed and made me understand why I was like this.”

She describes her autism as her superpower. I ask why. “A lot of people with autism have a special interest that they can sit and do for an eternity without getting bored. It’s a very useful thing sometimes. Autism can be something that holds you back, but if you get to the right circumstance, if you are around the right people, if you get the adaptations that you need and you feel you have a purpose, then it can be something you can use for good. And I think that I’m doing that now.” Thunberg has not just become the world’s best-known climate change activist, but also its best-known autism activist.

As she tells her story, I can’t help thinking of it as some kind of parable – the girl who was ignored, or worse, by her peers who becomes the face of a global movement for young people.

Her rhetoric is as beautiful as it is brutal. Again, she thanks her autism for the bluntness of her language. In a thunderous speech at the UN climate action summit in 2019, she told the great and the good: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” It was an extraordinary sight – the schoolgirl rebuking the world’s leaders in the language of a furious parent. And the very people she was condemning gave her a standing ovation.

There was a frightening intensity to the speech. You couldn’t help wondering what it was taking out of Thunberg. Does she feel she has missed out on her teens? “No, definitely not. I don’t have an urge to party or drink alcohol or do whatever teens normally do. I enjoy much more doing this and being a nerd!” I ask what she does to relax. “I listen to music, and podcasts. But I do other things. I do embroidery like I’m doing now.” I hadn’t even noticed that she was stitching away while chatting. Can I see what she’s making? “No, because it’s a surprise for somebody,” she says.

Actually, she says, she’s got loads of hobbies. “I also do a lot of jigsaw puzzles. The biggest was 3,000 pieces, but that didn’t fit on the table so it was very complicated to finish. And I also spend time with my two dogs [a golden retriever and black labrador] and talk lots to friends. We are very silly. Maybe people have an idea that climate activists are serious, but that’s not the case.” She hiccups another giggle.

Do you really speak to your climate activist friends every day? “Yes, many times a day.” Do you have parties? “Since we are spread all over the world it’s hard to do that, but we have Zoom calls and movie nights online and lots of chats where we just spam each other.”

I didn’t have the courage to get friends. Now I have many, I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters

Wow, I say, so, really, you’re just a bunch of jokers? A little crease spreads across her lips. I think she’s smiling. “Yes, we discuss very important topics like mousse and baby carrots, and bread. Sometimes we have very heated discussions.” About chocolate mousse? “No!” she says, appalled. “The animals.” Do you discuss whether moose are in danger of extinction? “No! I don’t know if I want to say this. We joke we are a moose cult.” Why? “It’s a very long story. And then we have these internal jokes, like the poem about the baby carrot.” At this point, I have to admit to her that she’s lost me. But she’s on a roll. “It’s Henrik Ibsen. You can Google it. We sometimes have discussions where we just write ‘babycarrot, babycarrot, babycarrot’.” (I do Google it later, and discover it’s a source of contention whether Ibsen actually wrote the 11-word poem Dear Babycarrot.)

That’s bonkers, I say. She nods, happily. I love seeing her like this. It feels a privilege to be let into her private world, however briefly. Lots of people would think you don’t have the time or the inclination to mess around, I say. “I think we mess around a bit too much. I may make us sound like idiots now, but that’s what we do.”

I drag her away from the world of moose and baby carrots to discuss Cop26. How optimistic is she that the conference can achieve anything? “I am not. Nothing has changed from previous years really. The leaders will say we’ll do this and we’ll do this, and we will put our forces together and achieve this, and then they will do nothing. Maybe some symbolic things and creative accounting and things that don’t really have a big impact. We can have as many Cops as we want, but nothing real will come out of it.”

What does she think about the fact that Boris Johnson says climate is his priority while at the same time supporting new coalmines in Cumbria and the Cambo oil fields off the coast of Shetland? “It’s hypocritical to talk about saving the climate as long as you’re still expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.” She says she can’t think of a single politician who has impressed her. “Nobody has surprised me.” What about, say, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who said that the climate crisis was a matter of “life or death” at the June launch of her new roadmap to control global heating? She looks sceptical. “It’s funny that people believe Jacinda Ardern and people like that are climate leaders. That just tells you how little people know about the climate crisis.” Why? “Obviously the emissions haven’t fallen. It goes without saying that these people are not doing anything.” In April, it was revealed that New Zealand’s greenhouse-gas emissions had increased by 2% in 2019.

Little has been seen of Thunberg during the pandemic. In May a short film conceived by her examined how people’s land use, agricultural practices and exploitation of animals create the perfect conditions for diseases to spill over from animals to humans, making pandemics ever more likely. The Friday strikes became virtual as live activism was put on hold. The enforced break was necessary, her father says. She had done so much and travelled so far (twice crossing the Atlantic by boat in 2019 to attend conferences, and journeying through America and Canada to witness the impact of climate change) that she was exhausted. “The pandemic has been a complete tragedy for everyone, of course, but being stuck here in Sweden for a year and a half has been good for Greta,” Svante says. “She definitely needed a break after all the madness she’s been through.”

However, the last thing Thunberg herself wanted was a break – the climate wouldn’t wait for her and, anyway, she was on a high. After all those years of struggle, she had finally found her purpose.

It’s astonishing how many people see you as some kind of secular saint, I say. “No!” she says adamantly. She sounds shocked, almost angry at the suggestion. Do you find yourself getting bigheaded? “No, it’s very important not to. But I think it’s an exaggeration saying many people treat me as a saint. More people treat me like something very, very bad. There are people who laugh as soon as they hear my name.” Why? “Because they have already decided what they think of me and nothing they hear will change that point of view because it’s such a filter bubble. And they just hear fake stories about me, and people who mock me. So it’s two extremes.”

When people mock you, what are they mocking? “Oh, ‘The climate goblin is forcing you to stop eating meat’, which I have never said. They just do it to make fun of me and other climate activists.” Does that hurt you? “Noooooah,” she says sweetly. “I understand that everybody has their own sense of humour. Me, personally, it doesn’t hurt, but if it affects my family or other activists, then it’s a different thing.”

And has it affected your family? “Yes. If there are people standing outside your house filming you through the window and then trying to break in, of course that affects the family. And constantly having rumours spread about you that you’re manipulating your child, of course that affects you.” Again, she says that the rumours about herself don’t bother her. Such as? “According to some, I’m an evil, manipulative child who takes advantage of everyone I meet. Others say I’m a helpless child who has been exploited. Some say I’m a communist; some say I’m an extreme capitalist; some say I’m an agent for India, or Russia, or the US … ” She could go on. How is she an extreme capitalist? She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Svante is not so quick to shrug it off, though. She has had to deal with more than rumours, he says. “There have been lots of death threats, and one man has been sentenced in court in Sweden. As a parent you’d be a fool not to worry about that.” Does it scare him? “Of course. There are a lot of crazy people out there. Now, though, her being 18, she’s an adult, she makes her own decisions; she can decide everything and she just wants to live like a normal person. Her being a public figure is not a place where you necessarily want to be.”

Thunberg is not alone in receiving threats. Climate activists are being targeted around the world. This month, the campaign group Global Witness revealed that more than 220 activists who work to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year – a record number.

As well as her enemies, there are the Greta groupies to cope with. While the locals let her get on with her life in Stockholm, some international fans have been more intrusive, Svante says. “When we came back from North America, she couldn’t stay at home because people kept showing up. They travelled from various countries and came knocking on the door, and that was a bit of a problem.” It got so bad that he and Greta moved out of the family home into another apartment.

Just a few weeks ago, she left home permanently to live by herself. Could he imagine when Greta was struggling most that at 18 she would be living independently? “The main thing I’m concerned about is my children being well, and the fact that Greta is now living by herself, coping by herself, travelling by herself is amazing,” he says.

Thunberg is enjoying the new freedoms of adult life. Yesterday she went on a demo that had nothing to do with climate – a protest against the violence in Afghanistan. She thinks she may go to university next year, but nothing has been finalised. Career-wise she always tells Svante she’d love to do something that’s nothing to do with climate, because it would mean that the crisis has been averted. But they both know it’s a fantasy. In the meantime, she is back striking in the real world, on Fridays, alongside millions of others.

I sense that what she’s really looking forward to is spending quality time with her friends at Cop26, tearing a strip off the heads of state for failing the world’s young yet again, and chatting nonsense about moose cults and baby carrots.

I ask if she was friendly with any young people before she became an activist. “No,” she says baldly. Would you say until three years ago you didn’t have any friends? “I had friends, but I didn’t have friends my own age. I was a good friend with my teacher, and I had friends when I was younger. Then I didn’t. So it was a strange feeling to have always been the quiet person in the back that nobody really noticed, to becoming someone lots of people actually listen to.”

Hers is a remarkable story. Not just the fantastical stuff – the little girl who conquered the world. But the smaller, more personal story, the one she’d doubtless tell us doesn’t matter – the lost little girl who learned how to belong. This is the one that really moves me.

When she didn’t have friends, did she want them? “I think I did, but I didn’t have the courage to get friends,” she says. “Now, when I have got many friends, I really see the value of friendship. Apart from the climate, almost nothing else matters. In your life, fame and your career don’t matter at all when you compare them with friendship.”

Thunberg says she has met like-minded people – in every way. “In the Fridays for Future movement, so many people are like me. Many have autism, and they are very inclusive and welcoming.” She believes the reason that so many autistic people have become climate activists is because they cannot avert their gaze – they have a compulsion to tell the truth as they see it. “I know lots of people who have been depressed, and then they have joined the climate movement or Fridays for Future and have found a purpose in life and found friendship and a community that they are welcome in.” So the best thing that has come out of your activism has been friendship? “Yes,” she says. And now there is no mistaking her smile. “Definitely. I am very happy now.”

Makeup Jeanette Törnqvist

Hair Erika Svedjevik (both for Lundlund)

Post-production IWonderU Studios

Digital design Harry Fischer

Greta Thunberg

T he civil rights movement leaders of the 1960s had no idea that school-shooting survivors from one of the most southern points in the U.S. would lean on their teachings to power a modern nonviolent movement to end gun violence. Students around the world began standing up for their survival, leaning only on the fire inside them to prevent the pain they understand too intimately.

Greta Thunberg saw her power in us, and we in turn see our power in her. Fighting in her home country, Sweden, for a future free from pollution, environmental degradation and climate change, Greta is inspiring steadfast students and shaming apathetic adults.

She realized early on that the powers that be would be stacked against her and her mission, stating, “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.” Greta went on to plan a multitude of student protests centered on action against our changing climate. Climate change is our reality, and youth activists like Greta are doing everything within their power to work against it, and demand a change.

González, a graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is a March for Our Lives co-founder

Greta Thunberg is part of TIME’s 2019 Next Generation Leaders series.

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Celebrities > Culture

Who is greta thunberg.

(Updated November 8, 2019)  A year ago, the name Greta Thunberg was unknown. The words “climate change,” however, were pretty familiar. They would conjure up images of icebergs, skinny polar bears, and Al Gore. They may have made you feel uncomfortable. They may have made you want to push them deep down into the depths of the plastic-filled oceans because ignorance is bliss, right? Thunberg says wrong.

Now when you think of climate change — or the climate crisis, as it is now commonly referred to — it’s likely you think of Thunberg, her unwavering commitment to saving the planet, and her sheer determination to wake up the rest of the world to help her. She may be in her teens, but the young woman from Sweden has made a monumental impact across Europe, and indeed, the rest of the world.

Thunberg is a 16-year-old from Sweden. Last summer, she began demonstrating outside the Swedish Parliament; she was demanding more action on the issue of climate change. In the weeks leading up to the country’s general election, Thunberg sat on the steps outside of the parliament building in Stockholm. She held up a (now iconic) sign that read “Skolstrejk För Klimatet” — it translates to “school strike for climate.”

She said at the time,  “I am doing this because nobody else is doing anything. It is my moral responsibility to do what I can. I want the politicians to prioritize the climate question, focus on the climate and treat it like a crisis.”

Many told Thunberg she should be at school. She responded, “I have my books here. But also I am thinking: what am I missing? What am I going to learn in school? Facts don’t matter anymore. Politicians aren’t listening to the scientists, so why should I learn?”

Fast forward to now, and the teen still isn’t giving school much thought. She’s now famous around the world for raising awareness about the climate crisis. In the past year, Thunberg has held governments accountable with her damning speeches. She recorded a spoken-word record with British band The 1975, spoke at the United Nations climate talks, and has even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Together with two other MPs, Norweigan Socialist MP Freddy Andre Ovstegard nominated Thunberg. He said, “we have proposed Greta Thunberg because if we do nothing to halt climate change, it will be the cause of wars, conflict, and refugees.” He added, “[Thunberg] has launched a mass movement which I see as a major contribution to peace.”

The teen has even had a tiny beetle named after her. Scientists at the Natural History Museum named the insect species — discovered 50 years ago — Greta Thunberg to honor her “outstanding contribution” to the fight against the climate crisis.

She’s now on sabbatical in America — after sailing the Atlantic in an eco-friendly superyacht — attempting to spread her message across the U.S.

She declined to speak with President Donald Trump during her trip, simply stating that it would be a waste of time. She has, however, spoken with former President Barack Obama.

After his meeting with the Swedish teen, Obama Tweeted,  “just 16, [Greta Thunberg] is already one of our planet’s greatest advocates. Recognizing that her generation will bear the brunt of climate change, she’s unafraid to push for real action.” During the meeting, Thunberg and Obama fist-bumped and he told her, “you and me, we’re a team.”  He also asked about the climate strikes in New York and Washington. She responded,  “everyone is so nice and all of these young people seem so eager, very enthusiastic which is a very good thing.”

Thunberg recently teamed up with British writer, activist, and fellow vegan George Monbiot to create a short film about the climate crisis. “This is not a drill,” the 16-year-old opens the film by saying. “My name is Greta Thunberg. We are living in the beginning of a mass extinction.”

In the video, Thunberg speaks about the importance of halting the burning of fossil fuels. “But this alone will not be enough,” she says. Monbiot explains the significance of trees, or “magic machines” as he calls them. This “natural climate solution” sucks carbon out of the air, is relatively cheap, and builds itself. “Nature is a tool we can use to repair our broken climate,” he says.

The duo highlight that we spend 1,000 times more on global fossil fuel subsidies than on natural-based solutions. Natural climate solutions get just 2 percent of all the money used to address the climate crisis. “This is your money. It is your taxes and your savings,” the Swedish activist states.

Humankind is destroying these natural climate solutions faster than ever. Up to 200 species go extinct every day. “Much of the arctic ice is gone, most of our wild animals have gone, much of our soil has gone,” Monbiot says.

They add that we must protect nature, restore damaged ecosystems, stop funding things that destroy nature and start funding things that assist it.

Student Protests

Thunberg’s mass movement involves millions of school children. The School Strike for Climate — or Fridays for Future — has seen students from all over the world ditch the classroom for meaningful peaceful protest.

Thunberg started her strike in August. In September, she started attracting media attention, and in November 2018, 17,000 students in 24 different countries took part in school strikes on Fridays. It was shortly after this that Thunberg began making high profile speeches.

By March 2019, nearly two million students in 135 countries protested against climate change. In August, the number of people striking for the planet hit 3.6 million.

Students across New York City were granted absence from school to take part in the Global Climate Strike. From September 20 to 27, millions of people around the world joined students to protest for more action on the climate crisis.

In the UK, student strikers were backed by the Trades Union Congress and Amnesty International. The latter called for headteachers around the world to also back the protests.

Secretary-general of Amnesty International Kumi Naidoo wrote to nearly 25,000 schools in the UK, as well as 2,000 in New Zealand, Canada, Hungary, and Spain. He asked headteachers to allow their students to take part in the strikes without punishment.

“I believe that the cause for which these children are fighting is of such historic significance that I am writing to you today with a request to neither prevent nor punish your pupils from taking part,” he wrote.

Young activists have also captured the attention of U.S. Congress. Thunberg and several teen activists from the U.S. and South America recently attended the Senate climate crisis talks. During the talks, Congress praised their commitment to the cause and asked for advice on how to proceed in terms of tackling the climate crisis.

Thunberg responded,  “please save your praise. We don’t want it. Don’t invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it because it doesn’t lead to anything.”

She added,  “if you want advice for what you should do, invite scientists, ask scientists for their expertise. We don’t want to be heard. We want the science to be heard. I know you are trying but just not hard enough. Sorry.”

The Climate Change Crisis

According to the United Nations, humanity has under 12 years to prevent a climate change crisis. A report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the end of 2018 called for immediate “unprecedented changes” to all aspects of society.

If we do not act, rising global temperatures pose a high risk of social and environmental disasters, including floods, drought, wildfires, and food shortages for millions of people.

“Our house is on fire,” Thunberg said at The World Economic Forum in Davos. She continued,  “on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.”

She later added,  “you say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t.”

Thunberg is hardball in her message. But it’s working. Earlier this year, Mohammed Barkindo — the secretary-general of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) — acknowledged public opinion surrounding the climate crisis as a threat to the oil industry.

He said that climate activism was “beginning to … dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry.” He added that officials were starting to feel pressure from their own families.  “[Their children] are asking us about their future,”  he said.  “They see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry.”

Oil is just one industry contributing to the climate crisis. Another is animal agriculture. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, tackling meat consumption is the world’s most “urgent problem.”

It said in a statement last year,  “our use of animals as a food production technology has brought us to the verge of catastrophe.”  It added that  “the greenhouse gas footprint of animal agriculture rivals that of every car, truck, bus, ship, airplane, and rocket ship combined. There is no pathway to achieve the Paris climate objectives without a massive decrease in the scale of animal agriculture.” Last year, the biggest-ever food production analysis revealed that the best way for any consumer to reduce their impact on the planet is to go vegan. Lead researcher Joseph Poore said at the time,  “a vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use.”

“It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,”  he added.  “Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems. Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this.”

Is Greta Thunberg Vegan?

Due to the industry’s monumental impact on the planet, Thunberg doesn’t eat meat . She follows a vegan diet. She has said in the past that she believes animal agriculture is stealing her future.

In an interview earlier this year, she recalled what it was like speaking to her parents about the climate crisis and convincing them not to eat meat.  “In the beginning, they were like everyone else,” she said. “They were like ‘don’t worry, someone will invent something in the future. People have this under control.'”

“But the more I read about it the more I understood that we don’t have this under control. And so then I started to become worried,”  she added. She learned about the impact of animal agriculture on the planet and tried to convince her parents to change their diets.

“I just kept telling them that they were stealing our future,” she said.  “[I told them] that you cannot stand up for human rights while you are living that lifestyle. And then they decided to do those changes.” 

Charlotte Pointing

Senior Editor, UK | Southsea, United Kingdom Charlotte writes about sustainable beauty, fashion, food, and culture. She has a bachelor's degree in history and a postgraduate certificate in cultural heritage.