BERLIN: Hundreds of thousands of young climate activists rallied across Europe on Friday ahead of EU Parliament elections as part of protests worldwide demanding action against global warming.

In Germany alone, wrote the Fridays for Future group on Twitter, “320,000 people have gathered on the streets for today’s #ClimateStrike — our biggest strike yet!” From Lisbon to Oslo, children and youths skipped school and voiced their anxiety about inheriting a warming planet with melting ice caps and worsening storms, floods and droughts.

“You are running out of excuses, we are running out of time,” read one message in Berlin directed at politicians, while another demanded: “The climate is changing, why aren’t we?” In Warsaw, around 1,000 students lay down on a major city intersection in a brief “die-in” that, an organiser said, was meant to “symbolise what will happen to us in the future”.

“We are all in the same boat,” read a protest sign in Madrid, expressing the shared sentiment of youngsters who rallied in cities across more than 120 countries.

Some 15,000 activists marched in Paris, while a roughly equal number demonstrated at Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate, chanting “What do we want? Climate justice!

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2019