Climate movement

Fossil fuel divestment or fossil fuel divestment and investment in climate solutions is an attempt to reduce climate change by exerting social, political, and economic pressure for the institutional divestment of assets including stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments connected to companies involved in extracting fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel divestment campaigns emerged on campuses in the United States in 2011 with students urging their administrations to turn endowment investments in the fossil fuel industry into investments in clean energy and communities most impacted by climate change.[6]

By 2015, fossil fuel divestment was reportedly the fastest growing divestment movement in history.[7] In April 2020, a total of 1,192 institutions and over 58,000 individuals representing $14 trillion in assets worldwide had begun or committed to a divestment from fossil fuels.[5][8][9]

The school strike for climate (Swedish: Skolstrejk för klimatet), also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, is an international movement of school students who skip Fridays classes to participate in demonstrations to demand action from political leaders to take action to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy.

Publicity and widespread organising began after Swedish pupil Greta Thunberg staged a protest in August 2018 outside the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), holding a sign that read "Skolstrejk för klimatet" ("School strike for climate").[12][13]

A global strike on 15 March 2019 gathered more than one million strikers in 2,200 strikes organised in 125 countries.[14][15][16][17] On 24 May 2019, the second global strike took place, in which 1,600 events across 150 countries drew hundreds of thousands of protesters. The events were timed to coincide with the 2019 European Parliament election.[16][18][19][20]

The 2019 Global Week for Future was a series of 4,500 strikes across over 150 countries, focused around Friday 20 September and Friday 27 September. Likely the largest climate strikes in world history, the 20 September strikes gathered roughly 4 million protesters, many of them schoolchildren, including 1.4 million in Germany.[21] On 27 September, an estimated two million people participated in demonstrations worldwide, including over one million protesters in Italy and several hundred thousand protesters in Canada.[22][23][24]

The September 2019 climate strikes, also known as the Global Week for Future, were a series of international strikes and protests to demand action be taken to address climate change, which took place from 20–27 September. The strikes' key dates were 20 September, which was three days before the United Nations Climate Summit, and 27 September.[25][26] The protests took place across 4,500 locations in 150 countries.[27][28] The event is a part of the school strike for climate movement, inspired by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.[29][30] The Guardian reported that roughly 6 million people participated in the events,[31] whilst 350.org—a group that organised many of the protests—claim that 7.6 million people participated.[32]

The 20 September protests were likely the largest climate strikes in world history.[33][34] Organisers reported that over 4 million people participated in strikes worldwide,[33] including 1.4 million participants in Germany.[35][36] An estimated 300,000 protesters took part in Australian strikes,[37] a further 300,000 people joined UK protests[38] and protesters in New York—where Greta Thunberg delivered a speech—numbered roughly 250,000.[26][34] More than 2,000 scientists in 40 countries pledged to support the strikes.[39]

A second wave of protests took place on 27 September,[40] in which an estimated 2 million people took part in over 2,400 protests.[31][41] There were reported figures of one million protesters in Italy,[42] and 170,000 people in New Zealand.[43] In Montreal, where Greta Thunberg spoke, the Montreal school board cancelled classes for 114,000 of its students.[44][45] Hundreds of thousands of people, including several federal party leaders, joined the march in Montreal.[46]