Thousands of NZ Children Kick off New Climate Strikes

Thousands of students marched across New Zealand on Friday to kick off the second planned global school strike for climate action.

The latest round of protests builds on last week’s marches by millions of children around the world.

It is planned to roll through Asia and Europe before culminating in a rally in Montreal, Canada, where teenage activist Greta Thunberg is scheduled to speak.

Thunberg – credited for inspiring the school strikes – had lambasted world leaders for the lack of climate change policies at the United Nations Climate Action summit in New York this week.

The scores of protests carried signs that read “We’re skipping our lessons, so we can teach you one” and “You can’t comb over climate change”.

The Organizer School Strike for Climate NZ tweeted that it had received credible reports that 170,000 people were striking nationwide, a figure that would represent 3.5% of the country’s population.

Local media put the crowd in the capital of Wellington, where students were delivering a petition to the national parliament calling on the government to declare a climate emergency, at around 40,000.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who is in New York at the climate summit, announced Thursday that she had support from four other countries for a proposed new trade agreement to combat climate change.

Ardern said negotiations would begin with Norway, Iceland, Costa Rica, and Fiji early next year, and expressed her hopes that other nations would sign-on.

World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that around 7 million people die per year from exposure to fine particles in polluted air that lead to diseases such as stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and respiratory infections, including pneumonia.

The organization has estimated that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.

It pointed out that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases through better transport, food and energy-use choices can result in improved health, particularly through reduced air pollution.