On March 15, students worldwide skipped classes to take to the streets to protest their governments’ failure to take sufficient action against global warming.
The coordinated ‘school strikes,’ held from the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish Parliament last year.
Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, driven by social media-savvy students and dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change.