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Environment advocate Greta Thunberg is Time Person of the Year
Greta Thunberg emerged as the face of the youth climate movement after she started skipping school once a week to protest outside her country’s parliament. In the past year and a half, she has drawn large crowds at international conferences and demonstrations outside Sweden.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was named Time’s “person of the year” Wednesday, becoming at age 16 the youngest person to whom the U.S. magazine has given the title.
Thunberg emerged as the face of the youth climate movement after she started skipping school once a week to protest outside her country’s parliament. In the past year and a half, she has drawn large crowds at international conferences and demonstrations outside Sweden.
Some have welcomed Thunberg’s environmental activism, including her speeches challenging world leaders to do more to stop global warming. But others have criticized the teenager’s sometimes combative tone.
“For sounding the alarm about humanity’s predatory relationship with the only home we have, for bringing to a fragmented world a voice that transcends backgrounds and borders, for showing us all what it might look like when a new generation leads, Greta Thunberg is TIME’s 2019 Person of the Year,” the media franchise said Wednesday on its website.
Leaving a United Nations climate conference in Madrid where she addressed negotiators on Wednesday, Thunberg told The Associated Press she was “a bit surprised” by Time’s recognition, which she dedicated to all young activists.
“I could never have imagined anything like that happening,” she said in a phone interview.
“I’m of course, very grateful for that, very honored,” Thunberg said, but added: “It should be everyone in the Fridays for Future movement because what we have done, we have done together.”
Thunberg said she was hopeful the message of urgency she and other activists are communicating — that governments need to drastically increase their efforts to combat climate change — is finally getting through.
The teenager has also been a strong advocate of science, regularly citing complex studies about the causes and impacts of climate change.
On Wednesday, Thunberg used her address at the U.N.’s annual climate summit to accuse governments and businesses of misleading the public by holding talks that she said aren’t going to stop the world’s “climate emergency.”
“The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative PR,” she said.
Thunberg cited scientific reports showing that national pledges to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions aren’t enough to meet the ambitious goal set in the 2015 Paris climate accord of keeping temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsis (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.
“This is not leading, this is misleading,” she told officials, adding that “every fraction of a degree matters.”
Thunberg said the youth climate movement, which has staged repeated worldwide protests attended by hundreds of thousands of people, has managed to spread awareness about the need to urgently emissions and help those already affected by global warming.
“To get in a sense of urgency in the conversation that is very needed right now to be able to move forward,” she said. “That, I think, is our biggest success.”
Asked whether she thought world leaders were beginning to respond to this message, Thunberg told the AP: “They say they listen and they say they understand, but it sure doesn’t seem like it.”
“If they really would listen and understand then I think they need to prove that by translating that into action,” she added.
She said the experience of the past 15 months, going from solo-protester outside the Swedish parliament to addressing world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, had changed her.
“I think life is much more meaningful now that I have something to do that has an impact,” Thunberg said in a phone interview.
She plans to head home to Sweden for some rest during the holidays. “If you don’t take breaks, you won’t be able to continue,” she said.
Last year’s Time winners included slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; the staff of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, where five people were shot to death; Philippine journalist Maria Ressa; and two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.
(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)
