Tens of thousands start second wave of global climate protests

Tens of thousands of mostly young people marched to New Zealand’s parliament on Friday, kicking off a second wave of worldwide protests demanding swift action on climate change.

The protests were inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who spoke to world leaders this week at a United Nations summit in New York.

The march to the New Zealand parliament in the capital, Wellington, was one of the largest protests ever held there, and organisers needed to change their security plans to accommodate a swelling crowd. Thousands more marched in Auckland and in other parts of the country.

On the other side of the planet, tens of thousands rallied in Italy’s capital, Rome, where protesters held up signs with slogans such as “Change the system, not the climate” or just the word “Future.”

Another march in the Italian financial hub of Milan, a banner read “How dare you!” — the accusation Thunberg, 16, leveled at world leaders during her UN speech in New York on Monday. The Italian Education Ministry said students attending the event would not be penalised for missing school.

Fears about the impact of global warming on the younger generation were expressed by schoolchildren in Dharmsala, India. South Asia depends heavily on water from the Himalayan glaciers that are under threat from climate change.

In Germany, activists from the Fridays for Future group planned to protest a package the government recently agreed for cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Experts say the proposal falls far short of what’s needed if the world’s sixth biggest emitter is to meet the goal of the Paris climate accord.

The protests are part of the so-called global climate strike that saw what organisers have said were several million people march in cities across the world last Friday ahead of the UN climate meeting. New Zealand, Italy, Canada and a number of other countries focused their protest efforts on the second wave, bookending a week in which climate change was at the forefront of the global conversation.

Thunberg said she planned to attend a protest in Montreal.

“New Zealand leading the way into Friday nr 2 in #WeekForFuture,” she tweeted. “Good luck everyone striking around the world. Change is coming!!”

In Wellington, 18-year-old university student Katherine Rivers said it was great to see young people taking action and personal responsibility by marching.

“We need to stop pandering to some of the people who are making money off climate change. The big oil companies, the dairy industry etc.,” she said. “And make a change for the future of these kids that are here.”

More than half of Europe’s endemic tree species, including the horse-chestnut, risk extinction, conservationists warned on Friday, blaming invasive species, unsustainable logging and urban development for their decline.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said out of the 454 tree species native to Europe, 42 per cent could disappear from the continent.

And a full 58 per cent of the tree species endemic to Europe — meaning they only exist on the continent — were now considered threatened with extinction, the IUCN said in an update to the tree section of its “Red List” of threatened species.

Even more worrying, the update found 15 per cent of them, or 66 species, were considered “critically endangered,” or just a step away from going extinct.

The report comes amid a growing sense of urgency to address global environmental degradation, with fires raging in the Amazon, and following UN warnings in May that climate change, habitat loss and other factors are pushing one million plant and animal species to the brink of extinction.

The IUCN described the development for Europe’s tree species as “alarming,” saying pests and diseases were especially fuelling their decline as well as invasive plants introduced by humans.

“Trees are essential for life on earth, and European trees in all their diversity are a source of food and shelter for countless animal species such as birds and squirrels, and play a key economic role,” Craig Hilton-Taylor, who heads the IUCN Red List Unit, said in the statement.

Agencies