By Kate Abnett

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Young people around the world began taking to the streets on Friday to demand urgent action to avert disastrous climate change, in their largest protest since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Five weeks ahead of the U.N. COP26 summit which aims at securing more ambitious climate actions from global leaders, the strike will take place.

Everybody is promising, but they don’t keep their word. Farzana Faruk Juhumu (22), a young climate activist from Dhaka in Bangladesh, said, “We want more action.” “We need the actual work and not the empty promises.”

Youth movement Fridays For Future reports that demonstrations were started in Asia, and they were held in over 1,500 locations. In Germany, organizers anticipated that hundreds of thousands would attend over 400 demonstrations.

It has been an unusual year with the pandemic. Greta Thunberg, a Swedish activist said that the climate crisis is not over.

Thunberg stated that the situation is quite the opposite. He will go on strike in Berlin, Germany’s capital.

In August, a U.N. landmark climate science report warned that climate change has been caused by human activities for many decades. However, it is possible to prevent some of the worst impacts from happening through large-scale and rapid action.

Currently, the governments have not made any plans to reduce emissions as fast as they could.

Last week, the United Nations stated that global emissions would rise by 16% in 2030 compared to 2010. This is far below the required 45% reduction to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Friday’s strikes marks the physical return of youth climate protests. These were held in person in 2019, when more than six millions people marched on the streets. The action was stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which largely ended mass demonstrations.

Yusuf Baluch (17), a young activist from Balochistan said that it was crucial for leaders to return to face-to-face events in order to address the global crisis.

His statement was, “Last time it had been digital. No one was paying much attention to us.”

However, access to COVID-19 vaccinations is still very limited in many countries. Activists from some of the poorer nations said that they will only be holding symbolic actions with a few people.

The global north is getting people vaccinated, so there might be a lot of them. Baluch explained that there is still a small number of vaccines in the south.