Disobedient youth: Lessons from the youth climate strike movement

In the middle of the long, hot European summer of 2019, 450 young people travelled from across Europe to the shores of Lake Geneva. They gathered together in the town of Lausanne as representatives of a new youth-led movement for climate justice which had erupted across Europe in the previous months. By the time these activists arrived in Switzerland, they had already co-ordinated a first major wave of strikes which mobilised 1.6 million people in March 2019 (Wahlström et al., 2019: 5) and three quarters of a million in May 2019 (Fridays for Future, 2021). This second school strike action coincided with the European Parliament elections. At their August meeting the strikers made the Lausanne Climate Declaration which articulated three major demands for this nascent movement (Fridays for Future, 2019): 1. Keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels. 2. Ensure climate justice and equity. 3. Listen to the best united science currently available. The Lausanne Declaration identified further details on how this might be done, such as calling for the declaration of a ‘Europe-wide climate emergency, which includes goals, targets, and mechanisms such as check-ups to ensure transparency and accountability’ (Fridays for Future, 2019: 7). However, strikers have generally resisted making or communicating specific policy demands. The Lausanne meeting was followed by a second wave of strikes in September 2019 with an estimated 7.6 million people participating in 6000 protest events across 185 countries (de Moor et al., 2020). The core youth strategy has been to use the strike tactic to collectively raise their voices. Their simple message has been to call on political representatives and states to respond to the climate crisis in a just way with the urgency that science requires