Belgrade joins global climate strike with second Fridays for Future protest

The Fridays for Future global climate strike is taking place around the world today, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who protested outside the parliament in 2018, demanding climate action in line with the Paris Agreement and who later resumed her “school strike for climate” on Fridays. Millions of people are estimated to be taking part in climate actions in some 156 countries around the world today.

The second Fridays for Future environmental protest in Belgrade, Serbia started at 5 PM, at the Terazije fountain, with young organizers addressing the gathering.

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This summer, in an op-ed for Balkan Green Energy News, Vladimir Đurđević, PhD, a professor at the Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade, wrote that one should not be surprised that teenagers “today are on the frontline of the fight against climate change and are organizing planet-wide protests, including in Belgrade.”

According to him, for today’s teenagers, whose future is threatened by ever more dramatic global warming, nothing short of plans contained in the Paris Agreement can be relevant. And these plans entail abandoning coal, oil, and gas by the mid-21st Century and shifting to 100% renewables.

Rather than fly, Greta sailed the Atlantic to climate conferences

In August 2019, Greta Thunberg sailed the Atlantic to attend climate conferences in the US and Chile. She opted not to fly in order to raise awareness of the aviation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. Greta sailed for 15 days on a racing yacht equipped with solar panels and underwater turbines, making her voyage climate neutral.

Direct emissions from aviation account for about 3% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions and more than 2% of global emissions, according to the European Commission’s data.

“Someone flying from London to New York and back generates roughly the same level of emissions as the average person in the EU does by heating their home for a whole year,” the European Commission states on its website.