Leadership: Who will save the planet?

One teenager walked out of school

and made the world take climate change seriously.

Another wants the world to have all the facts on climate change.

I'm disappointed because we are not only mourning the loss of our planet,

but also the destruction of our futures.

We will show you why they are leaders in efforts to save the planet,

and how you can be too.

Greta Thunberg is arguably the world's

most famous campaigner on climate change.

At fifteen, she stopped going to school

and instead sat outside the Swedish Parliament

demanding politicians reduce carbon emissions.

Her strike caught on:

millions of people around the world began protesting

for more action to tackle climate change.

Greta has travelled by boat, rail and bus

to many parts of the world to raise awareness.

If we don't realise that it is an emergency,

we won't be able to do anything about it

and humans are social animals: we look...

we look to the people around us and we look to our leaders for...

for guidance and if they are not treating it as a crisis

and they are not behaving as if this was a crisis,

we won't understand that it is a crisis

and then we will just continue like before.

She has spoken at many global climate change events

and shamed world leaders into action.

She famously spoke at the United Nations,

telling leaders they had stolen her dreams

and her childhood with their empty words.

So, what can you learn from this teenager

who woke the world up to the climate change emergency?

She was very, very successful in disrupting the status quo,

because her message was very simple

and she was able to deliver it in very direct ways

in the... face of a lot of criticism.

So, she was very resilient.

She was able to be incredibly disruptive

in the face of world leaders.

Greta Thunberg had a simple message

and a direct way of delivering it,

both of which had a big impact.

She was other-directed and collaborative.

She was democratic.

  All she wanted was to raise awareness

and when people joined her, she wanted to be collaborative,

whether it was with politicians, scientists,

or... or schoolchildren.

Greta is collaborative:

she is willing to work with others who believe the climate is in crisis.

What other qualities does she show?

Knowledge is... is power

and she had facts that she was able to communicate

in... in very direct ways.

So, she was able to raise the status of science,

where, at the time, politicians and world leaders

were downplaying the role of... of facts

from... from scientists.

Greta knows the facts on climate change,

which gives her message authority.

This has put her in stark contrast to some world leaders.

What Greta Thunberg has shown us, time and time again,

is how ineffective and how...

how world leaders have been irresponsible

with... with climate action.

So, I guess the simple question is if...

if schoolchildren can show world leaders what the issues are,

what could world leaders with those world resources do,

if they truly wanted to?

Greta highlights how ineffective other leaders

and many adults have been.

So, if you want to be like Greta?

My advice is to...

to be persistent,

to continue to think about

how to keep that clear message,

to work through the barriers that you will face

on... on that journey

and to mobilise

and to grow your message and your movement

with... with like-minded people

across... across differences.

You should be persistent.

This quality will help you to carry on

even in the face of challenges and criticism.

Meet Sophia Kianni,

  another teen fighting climate change:

And like many of you here today, I'm disappointed.

I'm disappointed because we are not only mourning the loss of our planet,

but also the destruction of our future.

In 2020, Sophia set up Climate Cardinals,

a thousands-strong group of volunteer translators

trying to make the latest research on climate change

available in as many languages as possible.

I started Climate Cardinals because it really stemmed

from an experience that I had in Middle School,

when I took a two-month trip to Iran, which is my parents' home country.

While I was there, I realised that my relatives

knew very little about climate change and that's because

there was almost no information available in Farsi,

which is their native language.

And so, I worked to translate information to Farsi

to teach my relatives about climate change

and I wanted Climate Cardinals to continue

the work that I was doing on a larger scale,

which is why we use student volunteers to translate climate information

into over 100 languages.

From her own experience, Sophia had identified the need

for climate change facts to be available in different languages.

So, how did she get started?

First, I started with the basics:

coming up with the name, a logo, branding,

then finding a website, and then we also took legal steps necessary

to become an official non-profit

and then, finally, we launched using social media, primarily TikTok,

to reach hundreds of thousands of students

and recruiting thousands of them to sign up to volunteer with us.

Sophia began with the basics,

which included completing legal paperwork.

What else has she learnt about leadership?

I think that I've learned a lot as a leader throughout this process.

I'm the executive director of Climate Cardinals,

so I oversee our fifteen directors

and hundreds of different students on our teams,

as well as our translation branch.

And so, I think it's definitely been an experience for me,

learning – how do I manage large groups of people?

But how do I also give them the autonomy to do things on their own?

How do I learn to trust people and know that they know what they're doing

and that I don't need to micro-manage others?

And so, I think that I've learned that

leadership is a process of continual learning

and it's not so much about leading others,

as 'leaning' with others in order to get work done.

Leadership involves trusting your team

and collaborating with others.

Why are young people leading on climate change?

I think that young people play a very crucial role

in getting people mobilised, out onto the streets,

and really playing a role in furthering climate-change education.

I think we, as young people, have become very adept

at using social media and our platforms to spread these messages,

as well as having very difficult conversations

with people older than us, like our parents and our relatives,

in order to make sure that they're informed when it comes to voting

and making sure that we're getting climate-progressive candidates

into office.

Young people, who are adept at social media,

are good at getting the message out.

So, how do you become a leader on climate change?

The biggest advice I would give to other young people,

who are interested in getting involved in the climate space,

is put yourself out there:

reach out to people that you're inspired by.

I started out by just DM-ing random climate activists on Instagram

and sending them emails, and just asking how I could work with them –

how I could contribute to the work that they were doing.

And that's how, initially, I got involved in Fridays For Future,

Extinction Rebellion, Zero Hour –

a number of different climate organisations.

So, reach out: collaborate, work with others and make contact.

This is key.

So, what have we learnt about becoming a leader?

You need a clear, direct and simple message.

Social media can help get your message out.

It's also really important to collaborate with others.