Parents and grandparents around the world are mobilising in support of the youth strikes for climate movement that has swept the globe.

Under the banner Parents for the Future, 34 groups from 16 countries on four continents have issued an open letter. It demands urgent action to fight climate change and prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5C, beyond which scientists say droughts, floods and heatwaves will get significantly worse.

“What our kids are telling us is what science has been telling us for many years – there is no time left,” the letter says. “We now owe it to them to act.”

“Parents – we are everywhere in society: in classrooms as teachers, in fields as farmers, in factories as workers, in hospitals as healers, in boardrooms as CEOs, in legislatures as policymakers,” it says. “We have the power to build this safe, just and clean future for our kids.”

Profile Read the letter from Parents for the Future Show On 15 March 2019, 1.6 million students from 125 countries and more than 2,000 cities marched to demand urgent and decisive actions against the climate crisis.

What our kids are telling us is what science has been telling us for many years. There is no time left. Climate change is not a looming threat anymore. It is an existential crisis whose impact we are already feeling from deadly wildfires in California and bleaching corals in Australia, to historic heatwaves in Japan and drought in South Africa. We, parents, grandparents, carers and all those who care about the next generation stand with and for our kids. We stand with the scientific community. We stand for urgent and far more ambitious actions, policies and measures in line with a future below 1.5C of warming. Our kids have bravely raised awareness and mobilised global public opinion to unprecedented levels. They have given us hope. We now owe it to them to act. Willingly or not, together we are the last generations which can take on the challenge of stabilising our climate and avoiding catastrophic climate change. Climate change will not go away if we refuse to look at it or deny it. The climate will only stabilise if we support, advocate and ultimately vote in line with the 1.5C goal. The climate catastrophe can be prevented if we educate, inspire and enable more of us to act. Parents – we are everywhere in society: in the classrooms as teachers, in the fields as farmers, in the factories as workers, in the hospitals as healers, in the boardrooms as CEOs, in the legislature as policymakers. We have the power to build this safe, just and clean future for our kids. The containment of man-made climate change must become the greatest achievement of this century. Together, we are ready.

Parents for the Future

The groups involved come from countries including the UK, Germany, US, Australia, India and South Africa. In the UK, the Mothers Rise Up group will march in London on 12 May, international Mother’s Day, and protests are expected in other nations.

“Although this is an event created by mums, it isn’t just for mums,” said Becky Wynn, from London. Wynn has two children – Seb, aged five, and Celeste, aged three. “We are calling anyone who is moved by the love of a child to join – fathers, grandparents, aunties, uncles, childminders and friends. We are all custodians of our threatened home.”

Greta Thunberg addresses student strikers for climate change in Berlin. Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock

The youth strikes for climate began with a solo protest by Greta Thunberg in Sweden in August 2018. “We live in a strange world, where children must sacrifice their education in order to protest against the destruction of their future,” she told an audience in Berlin on Saturday.

Thunberg has now met world leaders and the strikes swelled to an estimated 1.5 million students in 125 countries on 15 March. Weekly strikes, registered at the Fridays for Future website, are continuing, with almost 450 strikes in 68 countries. The next global day of strikes will be 12 April.

One of the instigators of the global action by parents is Helene Costa, from Parents For Future Seattle in the US and a mother of two. “If we don’t act for our own children, who will?” she said. “What we are seeing through the global youth mobilisation and this international letter from parents is the emergence of a transnational conscience around climate actions. That makes me very hopeful.”

Eve White, a mother of two from Tasmania, Australia, and part of Australian Parents for Climate Action, said: “Climate change will make my kids’ lives much harder than my life has been in many ways. This is incredibly unfair, especially as scientists have been warning us about this for decades and the solutions are available. So why aren’t we acting – urgently?”

In New Delhi, India, Bhavreen Kandhari, mother of twin girls, said: “My government needs to urgently focus on climate breakdown and the role of trees, coal, construction and their impact on our air and water as well. Our children are going to pay the price for our mistakes and that is not acceptable to me.”

Tim Habraken, a father of two from Rotterdam in the Netherlands, said: “For ages, parents grew up with the idea that their children would have a better life than theirs. Currently, we are seeing a world that not only will very likely be worse for our children, but potentially uninhabitable. We should ask: when our children hold us accountable in the future, and ask us what we did, can we live with ourselves?”