Published in 2022
17 hours and 13 minutes
Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate activist who, as a schoolgirl at age 15, began protesting outside the Swedish parliament about the need for immediate action to combat climate change. She has since become an outspoken and world famous climate activist.
She is known for having initiated the school strike for climate movement that formed in November 2018 and surged globally after the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24) in December the same year. Her personal activism began in August 2018, when her recurring and solitary Skolstrejk för klimatet (“School strike for the climate”) protesting outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm began attracting media coverage, even though Sweden has already enacted “the most ambitious climate law in the world” – to be carbon neutral by 2045.
On 15 March 2019, an estimated 1.4 million students in 112 countries around the world joined her call in striking and protesting. A similar event involving students from 125 countries took place on 24 May 2019.
Thunberg has received various prizes and awards for her activism. In March 2019, three members of the Norwegian parliament nominated Thunberg for the Nobel Peace Prize. In May 2019, at the age of 16, she featured on the cover of Time magazine. Some media have described her impact on the world stage as the Greta Thunberg effect.
What is this book about?
We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world’s leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.
You might think it’s an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope – but only if we listen to the science before it’s too late.
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
