Millions of young people are expected to take to the streets around the world Friday to demand more aggressive climate action from leaders in what many observers are calling a tipping point for the climate change movement.

From New York City to London, England to Cape Town, South Africa, citizens will walk out of their schools and workplaces to join youth-led climate strikes designed to thrust climate change to the top of every government agenda.

Inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who last August began skipping school to protest in front of her country’s parliament building, the strikes are part of the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Thunberg will lead Friday’s strikes from New York before addressing the summit, convened by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to encourage nations to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement.

The strikes, expected to be the largest demonstrations demanding climate action in history, could pressure governments to drastically curb global carbon emissions.

“With millions of people pouring into the streets to demand emergency climate action and to demonstrate collective grief over climate breakdown, this is definitely a watershed moment,” said Tina Yeonju Oh, a climate activist who in 2017 was named one of Canada’s top environmentalists under 25.

“It’s so powerfully necessary for people to take back public spaces, like the streets, and to demand that we can’t do business as usual, because frankly business as usual is destroying the planet.”

More than 3,500 events in 150 countries are planned for Friday. In New York City, the Department of Education has given permission to 1.1 million public school students to skip school to join that city’s protest, one of more than 800 events happening in the U.S. alone. Further strikes are planned for Sept. 27, including in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, where Thunberg will be in attendance.

In the midst of a whirlwind week — Thunberg went on the Daily Show and also met Barack Obama — the teen addressed U.S. Congress Wednesday and submitted a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate change. She implored lawmakers to “listen to the scientists.”

“And I want you to unite behind the science. And then I want you to take real action,” she said.

Thunberg’s unequivocal stance on the need for climate action has galvanized a youth-led grassroots movement that has spread across ages, cultures and borders.

“There’s a people’s emergency that is being declared from below. The shift is not that we have more politicians saying that it’s an emergency. It’s very much coming from the grassroots,” said author and social activist Naomi Klein, whose book “On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal” was released this month.

She said the urgency of the climate crisis is also spurred by last October’s report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report warned that we have just 12 years to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees, beyond which would result in increased risks of life-threatening environmental disasters.

Scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki said the IPCC’s stark warnings have contributed to a sea change in attitudes toward climate change. He also noted that while he and others have been working for decades to highlight the need for climate action, Thunberg deserves a Nobel Prize for her activism.

“I think Greta has done more than all the environmentalists in the world put together...but she did it on the basis of lots of people over the years who’ve struggled and struggled to get to this moment,” Suzuki said. “She was the right person saying the right thing at the right time.”

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Suzuki and former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis recently embarked on a cross-country speaking tour to urge young voters to make climate change the priority of the federal election campaign.

“We are at a moment when climate change is suddenly the cri de coeur of much of the world and certainly of young people, which is a magnificent thing to have happened because it’s their future we’re talking about,” said Lewis, who in 1988 chaired one of the first international climate change conferences, which took place in Toronto. “The problem is to go from the mass awareness to the implementation of what has to be done.

“It’s one thing to say ‘this is the moment.’ It’s another thing to say ‘implement the goddamn policies which are going to turn things around.’”

Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada, said it will be hard for politicians to ignore both the vast numbers of protesters and the growing consensus that acting on climate change is a moral imperative.

“One of the key things that social movements can do is change the idea of what is acceptable and what is normal,” Stewart said. “We’ve seen this shift in the past for women’s rights, civil rights, even smoking. What we need to do for the climate is to say: It is now unacceptable to continue to expand production and use of fossil fuels.”

But Lesley Wood, chair of the department of sociology at York University and who studies the spread of ideas and social movements, says that numbers alone may not lead to the bold changes needed to halt a warming planet.

She points to what she calls the “classic example” of the 2003 global protests against the invasion of Iraq.

“It was the largest international protest in human history and yet the war continued,” she said. “The moment was not right, apparently, for those numbers (of protesters) to translate into power.”

Despite her cautions, Wood said the rapid rise of widespread public recognition that a warming climate is a serious problem, coupled with real-time examples of environmental catastrophes, could lead to transformative change. “The burning rainforests, the burning arctic and all the hurricanes are being understood as an absolute crisis, and a justification for much more significant action on climate.”

Catherine Abreu, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, an alliance of more than 100 organizations across the country pushing for better climate policy, said climate change has become personal.

“Once something becomes personal, it becomes possible to make progress,” she said.

“I think what we’re seeing is a disillusionment with the kinds of pat on the head, ‘don’t worry it will be fine’ messages that many governments have been giving to people about climate change for the last three decades.”

Environmental activist Tina Yeonju Oh said that while she is heartened by the attention the strikes are receiving, they won’t be enough to force the world to grapple with the climate crisis.

“This isn’t the first strike the youth have organized and it definitely won’t be the last,” she said. Young people will continue to be out front, pushing governments and industries for radical climate solutions. “This is the generation to be the most impacted while having done the least to contribute to the problem.”

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