People — mainly young people — across the world walked out of school and work in a massive youth-led movement to draw attention to the climate crisis.



There were more than 3,600 events planned, according to the main organizing group #FridaysForFuture. The third global youth-run climate strike of the year, Friday’s event was poised to be the biggest yet and it seemed to deliver: streets in major cities around the world were shuttered with throngs of determined people holding clever signs and chanting.

The marches are leading up to the first-ever UN Youth Climate Summit in New York on Saturday.

“September 20 is not our goal,” Xiye Bastida, a 17-year-old climate activist who helped to organize the latest strike in New York, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a stepping stone, a catalyst for future action. It’s a point to tell the world we are watching.”

The climate strike movement is just over a year old. It started with 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who began striking alone every Friday in August last year outside of the Swedish Parliament building in Stockholm to call attention to climate change. In the year since, the movement has spurred hundreds to thousands of kids to strike regularly. Other climate movements, most notably Extinction Rebellion in the UK and the Sunrise Movement in the US, have tapped into growing frustration about a lack of climate action.

Thunberg has brought her blunt plea for climate action first to the international climate conference in Poland last year, the TED Talk stage, and, just this week, to the US Congress, where she told lawmakers, “This is the moment in history we need to be wide awake. Dreams cannot stand in the way of telling it like it is, especially not now.”

Here are scenes from how today's strikes unfolded across the world:

New York City