Focus on Arts and Ecology

Can the Fridays for Future movement recover its momentum?

Two years ago, an estimated 4 million people followed Greta Thunberg and her fellow youth activists into the streets, demanding swift action on climate threats. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the movement was largely forced online.

On Friday, groups of protesters returned to the streets in cities from London to Nairobi, chanting and waving homemade signs at the first major Fridays for Future protests since the start of the pandemic. But numbers were far smaller.

"It's slightly disappointing there are less people than there used to be - but people will come back. The problem is not going away," predicted Erin Brodrick, 17, one of about 250 protesters who marched in central London.

Thousands of young people - including Thunberg - will convege again this week in Milan, with about 400 set to meet policymakers to hammer out proposals to tackle global warming ahead of November's COP26 summit.

The need for stepped-up action on fast-rising climate threats is abundantly clear.

From New York to North Carolina and Texas, U.S. city officials say increasingly frequent and intense storms are making long-term planning more difficult, and forcing a rethink of which communities might be under threat, with heavy rains now flooding inland neighbourhoods never formerly at risk.

"The lesson is that climate change is impacting the entire borough now – you can't just look at the waterfront communities that historically flooded," said Donovan Richards Jr., president of the New York borough of Queens.

In Brazil, surging forest losses are worsening floods and droughts, hitting crop harvests and threatening energy blackouts and water shortages, experts warn.

"What we see now in terms of extremes in temperature and rainfall are perhaps a sample of things that may come if warming continues," said José Marengo, a climatologist with Cemaden, the government's disaster monitoring centre.

In India, however, officials are finding ways to create much-needed jobs and cut climate risks at the same time by hiring unemployed workers to plant wave-calming coastal mangroves, in a bid to lower threats from worsening storms and coastal erosion, and help families hit by the pandemic.

"I have seen the sea move forward into our land and one of our village roads has disappeared," said Marada Suguna, one woman working along the east coast under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which is increasingly focused on building local climate resilience.

"I think this mangrove plantation we are doing will help because it will stop the water and prevent the soil from eroding," Suguna told our correspondent Anuradha Nagaraj. "I feel it is important work."

See you next week!

Laurie