The first Fridays for Future global climate strike in two years stands in solidarity with Ukraine, urging leaders to embargo Russian fossil fuels while calling for climate reparations.

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Students and young people around the world took to the streets on March 25 to demand greater climate action and climate reparations as part of the first Future Fridays climate strike in two years.

Fridays for Future, a youth-led movement first introduced by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, last staged protests at the UN climate summit COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. This latest edition, however, has seen hundreds of protests take place on all seven continents. , ranging from New Zealand to the United States.

With a common rallying call “People Not Profit”, each chapter of the Climate Strike asks their respective countries to “follow the demands of Indigenous, Black, anti-patriarchal and diverse marginalized communities to reclaim their lands, donating resources to communities most affected by the climate crisis for adaptation, loss and damage,” the website says. All this in the form of climatic repairs.

Wealthy nations have broken their promise to provide US$100 billion climate finance to poor and developing countries from 2020 to help mitigate and adapt to climate change. At COP26, rich countries pledged to do so by 2022.

One of the biggest calls during the global strikes was to give up fossil fuels, with some urging an embargo on all purchases of Russian oil and gas following the invasion of Ukraine. The movement aims to highlight how current conflicts and social injustices around the world are all linked to the climate crisis.

“We shouldn’t treat them individually, but question the systems that underpin them,” said Fridays for Future Germany activist Jule Pehnte. “For example, the war in Ukraine is a war funded by our purchases of fossil fuels.” In solidarity with Ukraine, youth protests urging world leaders to make a faster transition to renewable energy; a move that could hurt Vladimir Putin’s economy and help the climate at the same time.

Although they believe there is no competition between their climate struggles and the current crises abroad, activists like Joy Koech of Fridays for Future Kenya fear that the severe floods and droughts that are dragging millions of people into a humanitarian catastrophe are rarely seen as urgent. The climate strike is to remind people of what is still at stake.

Other social concerns addressed in the conversation include indigenous, LGBT and women’s rights – their experiences inherently overlap with climate change – as well as topics such as land grabbing, competition for limited resources and overconsumption.

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Featured image by: Marco Verch/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)