Climate activist Greta Thunberg will skip school for a whole year starting this summer.
The 16-year-old Swede plans to concentrate on her fight against climate change after finishing her ninth grade, German press agency dpa has learned. In September, she intends to attend the United Nations Climate Change Summit in New York, and in December, she will attend the UN Climate Change Conference in Santiago de Chile.
She is not worried about her academic career, Thunberg said. She’ll just go to high school one year later. Normally, young Swedes move to a secondary school in August. Compulsory schooling is only required in the first nine years. Thunberg is considered the initiator of the “Fridays for Future” movement.
Since Thunberg does not fly as a principle of for climate protection reasons, her family is considering alternatives for getting overseas. The is therefore to cross the Atlantic by ship.
The Swedish newspaper “Dagens Nyheter” was the first to report about Thunberg’s plans. It quoted the activist as saying that it was very hard for her making the decision to skip school, but it was clear that something had to happen right now in the fight against climate change . “By 2020, if we want to have any chance of staying below 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, we’ll have to turn the emission curve steeply down.”