A Closer Look into Madrid’s Climate Change March
“No nos mires, únase! No nos mires únase!”. On the 15th of March, this chant echoed across the streets of Madrid as thousands of students descended on the city to protest climate change. It is a chant (translated to “Stop watching us, join us!”) that perfectly represents the atmosphere that hung around the student-led march. As part of the global “Fridays for Future” march, students from around the world left their classrooms to raise awareness of the lack of governmental-response towards global warming.
For those unfamiliar with the growing movement, it initially began in late November 2015, leading up to the UN Paris summit on climate. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of people called on the summit to reform policy to immediately address climate change. Despite having similar protests in the following years, the overall momentum of these ones quickly dissipated following the conference. It seemed the world had turned its head to other matters, but that would quickly change on August 2018, where the movement would find an unlikely savior that would revive attention throughout the world.
The student strike resurged on August 19th, when Swedish, fifteen-year-old named Greta Thunberg refused to attend class in protest of inadequate policy regarding climate change. Since then, students from around the world have begun protesting on a weekly basis. Per the Fridays-for Future website, they categorize the strikes between “weekly, big and deep, where big and deep strikes involve a larger scale cooperation between two more countries.” Suddenly, climate change has reached at the forefront of the world’s attention, and many wondered what was to happen next.
Standing in the crowd, one could not help but feel the frustration from the students. They would repeatedly shout at any photographers or curious onlookers to stop watching and join them. Consequently, the simple chant of encouragement saw the movement continuously swell as it marched towards the Spanish Congress Hall. The vast majority of the protesters were somewhere between their early teens and late twenties. Those speaking at the event presented a dialogue that focused on anti-establishment rhetoric. Through their speech and another popular chant “El problema, es el Sistema!”, they effectively laid the blame of climate change on capitalism and the system that supports it.
One might ask themselves, why is it that such a scale of student-centered protests are directed at climate change and not other issues that haunt the world on a daily basis. The answer comes in two parts. Firstly, they are the generation that will be most affected by the future effects of global warming. This could include rising temperatures, global loss of biodiversity and an increasing rate and scale of natural disasters. Secondly, there is the issue of the closing window of opportunity to act.
According to a report by the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) “the world would have to be carbon neutral by 2050 and cut emissions by around half by 2030”. Finally, with the openly anti-climate stance of one of the world’s biggest polluters, it is easy to see why the protests are desperately trying to bring to attention to the world an important threat; one that it has surprisingly decided to largely ignore.
The good news is that raising awareness has been successful. During the World Economic Conference in Davos, UN Secretary Antonio Guterres stated that “I think the climate risk is the most important systemic risk for the near future. I believe we are losing the race. Climate change is running faster than we are.”, highlighting how crucial protests are to bringing issues to forefront of politics. However, while raising awareness is important, the question on many people’s minds is what comes next?
Photos by: Olivier Garnier