Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World

People say a lot of things about me.

Greta. You know Greta?

BOOING

People call me a brat.

An idiot.

And yet, for reasons I don't understand,

people listen when I talk.

CROWD CHEERS

You are listening to me right now.

CROWD CHANTS

But I don't want that.

I don't want you to listen to me.

I want you to listen to the science.

The science is very clear.

This is not someone else's problem. We all need to act, now.

This series follows Greta on an extraordinary year

in her mission to fight climate change.

I've been going the whole way around the world - the wrong way.

She's taken a year off school to explore our changing world

with the world's leading climate experts...

This year, we had the fastest melt rate we've ever measured -

six metres of ice down.

Investigating whether science can help protect our future.

From technology...

We can store all the emissions you can potentially imagine

to nature...

It could reduce methane by 40% overnight.

Is it really that simple?

The forest is not a vacuum cleaner that just sucks CO2 from the air.

And how we can all play our part...

We should spend time on actual solutions, people could do.

We should be hopeful.

But hope doesn't come from words,

hope only comes from action.

Greta took her protest to the global stage.

World leaders are behaving like children,

so it falls on us to be the adults in rooms.

Seeing more of the world

gave Greta a new level of understanding.

You try to imagine yourself in that situation.

How difficult it must have been.

But it became a story no one could have predicted.

The risk level has risen.

The corona virus continues to spread.

Covid-19 brought life to a standstill...

I have contracted the coronavirus.

And gave Greta an even greater challenge.

Can she convince a world reeling from one crisis

to face another?

Covid-19 has really given the world a tremendous opportunity to reset.

How we address the climate crisis will determine what the future

of life on Earth looks like.

We can act.

But we don't have time to wait.

Greta has just under six months before returning to school.

She's continuing her journey across Europe, examining the latest

science to tackle climate change, and she's calling for action.

GREETS THE CROWD

World leaders are betraying us

and we will not let that happen any more.

Fridays For Future, the environmental movement

she's inspired, has now grown to over 14 million followers worldwide.

World leaders are still trying to run away

from their responsibilities.

We have to make sure that they cannot do that.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, world leaders pledged to hold the increase

in global warming to well below two degrees Celsius

and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

It's currently predicted to reach three degrees

by the end of the century.

Right now, we don't speak the same language as the planets.

So we can either choose to continue down this road, which will lead

to a climate disaster, or we can choose a different path.

Greta is headed to Brussels to address the European Parliament.

The EU has announced its Green Deal, which aims to reduce the bloc's

emissions to net zero by 2050.

But Greta believes this isn't enough.

People come up to me and say, "The EU have set up pledges"

"to be net zero. That must be a good thing, right?"

"It sounds good."

That's because people are not aware of what emissions they include

and, most importantly, exclude.

There are so many loopholes.

In November 2019, the European Parliament said that the EU

would lead against the existential threat of the climate crisis.

And yet, when the EU presents this climate law, net zero by 2050,

you indirectly admit surrender, that you are giving up.

Giving up on the Paris agreement,

giving up on your promises,

and giving up on doing everything you possibly can

to ensure a safe future for your own children.

No policy, plan or deal will be nearly enough as long as

you just continue to ignore the CO2 budget

which applies for today.

We don't just need goals for 2050.

We above all need them for 2020

and for every following year to come.

You said this was an existential threat.

Now you must prove that you mean it.

APPLAUSE

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg

has told the European Parliament

that its planned climate laws amount to surrender.

The problem is that we don't have the luxury of time to achieve

the huge emission cuts we need in order to stay

within the 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We don't have those decades.

The latest science tells us it is most likely that we will exceed

1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming.

That doesn't mean we get to give up,

because every tenth of a degree matters.

Those of us who study the problem knew we had a problem decades ago,

and if we had acted then, it would have been much easier to avoid

dangerous warming of the planet.

There's still time for us to correct course and to still achieve

the necessary emissions reductions that we need in order to avoid

dangerous climate change.

But it has to happen now.

We really only have ten years to get this right

if we want to hit this 1.5-degree target.

As the news bulletins report on Greta's speech,

a new and very different global threat is emerging.

The coronavirus was something very distant.

You still shook hands,

you didn't keep social distance and you didn't wear a mask.

No, no, no, no. We have no cases yet.

It never came across that we should not be meeting new people

or that we should not be protesting.

We had no idea that the Brussels strike would be the last strike.

Across Europe, a wave of Covid-19 infections...

As cases and deaths rise, more towns may be quarantined.

The European Union's entire external border will be sealed.

As Europe goes into lockdown, Greta has decided to stop campaigning...

That's it. Let's go.

...and she and her father Svante are heading home to Sweden

as quickly as possible.

Now I'm back home after the trip.

Me and my father, we have isolated ourselves away from my sister

and mother, because we started feeling symptoms

Er, after maybe three days, and then it got worse.

I had, like, a temperature for two weeks and a cough from hell.

Never been so sick in my life.

Greta was planning to go all these places.

Nothing could be done, you could not travel anywhere.

And she decided straight away, you know,

"I'm going to shut everything down."

As the pandemic continues to spread across the world, public protests

and marches have been suspended,

and Greta is now only campaigning from home.

Of course it's frustrating, but we just have to accept

that this is an emergency.

Hi, my name is Greta Thunberg.

I'm a climate and environment activist speaking to you from my

couch in Stockholm, Sweden.

Every week I post my normal strike picture, but it's from home.

So it's like climate strike online we're doing now.

The fact that I couldn't travel,

that was something that was good for me, I think,

to be able to just embrace the silence.

With Covid-19 restrictions less severe in Sweden than many other

countries, Greta is allowed to visit a local riding stables

which lets young people with autism take care of its horses.

This is a very special place.

This is a place where I have always felt good.

People with autism have difficulty spending time with people,

so the animals become a substitute for that.

As a child, Greta was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome,

a form of autism, and she's also experienced mental health issues.

At the age of 11, I became depressed and I stopped talking.

And then I stopped going to school and stopped... Ow. Stopped eating.

She sort of shut herself inside and it happened within, like, weeks.

And, of course, you're terrified at the beginning.

If your child doesn't eat, they...

..you know, they starve.

I so much disliked almost everything with this world we live in,

where everyone tries to be the same and... and...

..and thinks the same way. I didn't have one single friend

except my sister and my dogs and the horses.

In school, they would talk about the climate issue.

She could not get this information about what was happening

to the world and what we were doing to the world

and go back to a normal life.

And it changed everything, really.

I started school striking, and for some reason it was the right

thing to do, the right timing, so it was very accidental.

It was not on purpose.

I know that soon people will lose interest in me.

That's only natural, but that also makes it so important that I use

this time when I can reach out to people

to reach as many as possible.

We can't just feel like, "There's no point. Let's just give up."

That is not an option.

Science is fighting back against the new coronavirus.

There are more than a hundred potential vaccines being tested

at a cost of billions of pounds.

The pandemic has led to a global shutdown.

Air travel has dramatically reduced.

Factories are closed,

and roads and motorways are empty...

..in one of the most profound changes to human society in living memory.