School climate strikes: what next for the latest generation of activists?

School students across the UK (and the world) went on strike on February 15, leaving their lessons to protest the lack of effective action on climate change. Coordinated school strikes may be a novel tactic, but mass environmental activism isn’t. So will things be any more successful this time around?

The first big global wave of ecological concern began in the late 1960s and involved fears of overpopulation, air and water pollution and the extinction of species. It peaked with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which kicked off international environmental politics.

The next mass movement began in the late 1980s with concerns over the ozone hole, Amazonian deforestation and newly-voiced fears of climate change – then known as the “greenhouse effect”. That wave peaked with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which sought to tackle both global warming and biodiversity, and marked the beginning of coordinated climate action through the UN. 

Read the piece from The Conversation by a PhD Candidate from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, Marc Hudson - “School climate strikes: what next for the latest generation of activists?”