A SCOTTISH teenager will begin staging an hour-long weekly strike outside her school today, in a protest about climate change.
Holly Gillibrand, 13, a pupil at Lochaber High School in Fort William, is joining a growing global movement in which children stage Friday strikes. It began last year when Greta Thunberg, 15, from Stockholm, stopped attending school in the run-up to a Swedish general election, demanding the government reduce carbon emissions.
After the election, she continued to strike only on Fridays, gaining worldwide attention and inspiring pupils across the globe to follow her lead. Gillibrand announced her intention to strike on Twitter last month, saying in a tweet addressed to Prime Minister Theresa May: “Every Friday I am going to be striking from school because I will not sit silently while you and the British government contributes to the destruction of our only planet!”
Gillibrand said: “I am striking because we are running out of time. Thousands of children around the world should not be having to miss classes because of our leaders inability to treat the climate crisis as a crisis.”
By last month, more than 20,000 students had held strikes in at least 270 cities around the world.
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