Fridays for Future: Nobel Peace Prize teen nominee leads global climate strike

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01:53

A worldwide strike is planned for Friday with school students marching to demand adults take action against climate change. This global youth movement is being led by a 16-year-old from Sweden who has just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. CGTN's June-wei Sum has her story.

Greta Thunberg is just 16. This past December, she stood in front of policymakers several times her age, at the UN climate change talks in Poland.

GRETA THUNBERG CLIMATE ACTIVIST "You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake."

She spoke again at Davos in January, but it's among other students and young people that she's firing up real fervour.

From France and Germany, all the way to countries like Uganda and Japan, students have taken up Thunberg's call to strike in the name of climate change, most often on a Friday giving the movement the name, Fridays for Future.

GRETA THUNBERG CLIMATE ACTIVIST "We will continue until they do something, and we will not stop until we are done and that may take a while but we will be patient, and we will continue because this is our future, and this is our choice."

Her concerns are not unfounded. The United Nations' latest climate change report warned that the world has only a dozen years to bring global warming down to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

After that, scientists say the risks of extreme weather events, sea-level rise and devastation to food crops are likely to get far worse. June-wei Sum, CGTN.