Fridays for Future (FFF), also known as the School Strike for Climate (Swedish: Skolstrejk för klimatet[ˈskûːlstrɛjkfœrklɪˈmɑ̌ːtɛt]), is an international movement of school students who skip Friday classes to participate in demonstrations to demand action from political leaders to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy.
Publicity and widespread organising began after Swedish pupil Greta Thunberg staged a protest in August 2018 outside of the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, holding a sign that read "Skolstrejk för klimatet" ("School strike for the climate").[4][5][6]
A global strike on 15 March 2019 gathered more than one million strikers in 2,200 strikes organised in 125 countries.[1][7][8][9] On 24 May 2019, in the second global strike, 1,600 protests across 150 countries drew hundreds of thousands of strikers. The May protests were timed to coincide with the 2019 European Parliament election.[8][10][11][12]
The 2019 Global Week for Future was a series of 4,500 strikes across over 150 countries, focused around Friday 20 September and Friday 27 September. Likely the largest climate strikes in world history, the 20 September strikes gathered roughly 4 million protesters, many of them schoolchildren, including 1.4 million in Germany.[13] On 27 September, an estimated two million people participated in demonstrations worldwide, including over one million protesters in Italy and several hundred thousand protesters in Canada.[3][14][15]