“I’m not the kind of person who celebrates birthdays,” Greta Thunberg said as she turned 17 yesterday, marking the occasion in inimitable style – with a seven-hour hour protest outside the Swedish parliament.
“I won’t celebrate my birthday at all,” she told Stockholm daily Aftonbladet.
The climate activist braved winter conditions in her native Stockholm to continue the weekly Friday school strike for the climate campaign that helped catapult her to international fame.
Earlier she tweeted: “School strike week 72”, posting a photo of herself holding a hand-painted sign that read “school strike for climate”.
“I stand here striking from 8am until 3pm as usual ... then I’ll go home,” Thunberg, Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2019, told Reuters. “I won’t have a birthday cake but we’ll have a dinner.”
It’s been a busy 12 months for Thunberg, who crisscrossed the globe by car, train and boat – but not plane – to demand action on climate change.
Last month she returned to Sweden after being away for four and a half months.
“It has been a strange and busy year, but also a great one because I have found something I want to do with my life and what I am doing is having an impact,” she said.
“Every second” in the coming year will count, she said.
“In all scientific scenarios where we manage to keep average global warming below 1.5 degrees, we begin to bend the emissions curve sharply downwards latest in 2020,” Thunberg said.
In August 2018, when she was 15, Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to demonstrate outside the Swedish parliament to push her government to curb carbon emissions.
Schools in the Swedish capital were on Friday still off for Christmas holidays.
Thunberg plans to start school in August after her sabbatical.
“I feel fine. It feels like there’s lots to do and that we are ready for 2020. We will continue,” she said.
While away from Sweden, Thunberg has spoken at climate meetings from Switzerland to New York, and most recently addressed the UN Climate Conference in Madrid and a rally in Turin, Italy.
From New York, where she spoke at a UN climate summit, Thunberg attended other engagements in Montreal, Canada, and then travelled across the US to Los Angeles.
Madrid took over as host city for the UN climate conference from Santiago, Chile, which was cancelled due to unrest in the South American country.