Greta Thunberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Greta Thunberg sat down on the pavement outside the Swedish parliament on the 20th of August 2018, holding a handmade sign that read Skolstrejk for klimatet. She was fifteen years old, had just started ninth grade, and she was alone. What followed was one of the most discussed episodes in recent history: a solitary act of refusal that spread across the globe and drew praise from Nobel Prize winners, mockery from presidents, and front pages in dozens of countries. How did a teenager from Stockholm, diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and selective mutism, become the most visible climate activist on the planet? And what does her story tell us about the friction between personal conviction and institutional power?

• 2. A Family Reshaped

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  Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg was born on the 3rd of January 2003, in Stockholm, to opera singer Malena Ernman and actor Svante Thunberg. Her paternal grandfather was actor and director Olof Thunberg. Her middle name, Tintin, she shares with the adventuring creation of Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Herge. She first heard about climate change in 2011, when she was eight years old, and she could not understand why so little was being done. The situation depressed her, and by the age of eleven she had largely stopped talking, severely restricted her eating, and lost ten kilograms in two months. She was subsequently diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism. In one of her earliest speeches, she described selective mutism as meaning she "only speaks when necessary". She also mentions being bipolar in her Instagram bio, and she struggled with depression for almost four years before beginning her strike campaign.

  For roughly two years before the strike, Thunberg pushed her parents to shrink the family's carbon footprint by going vegan, upcycling, and giving up flying. She showed them graphs and data, and when that failed she told them they were stealing her future. Giving up flying meant her mother had to abandon international engagements in her opera career. Her father said in a December 2019 BBC interview: "To be honest, her mother didn't do it to save the climate. She did it to save her child, because she saw how much it meant to her." Thunberg credits those family changes with giving her the belief she could make a difference. Their experience became the basis for the 2018 book Scenes from the Heart, later updated in 2020 as Our House Is on Fire, with the whole family credited as authors.

  Thunberg views her Asperger diagnosis positively, describing it as a "superpower". Her mother disclosed the diagnosis publicly in Sweden in May 2015 to help other families in similar situations. By 2021, Thunberg said that many people in the Fridays for Future movement are autistic, and she believes autistic people become climate activists because "they cannot look away, and have to tell the truth as they see it". She considers the friendships and happiness that came from her activism to be its best outcomes.

• 3. The Strike That Spread

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  Thunberg got the idea of a climate strike after school shootings in the United States in February 2018 prompted students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, to walk out and organize the March for Our Lives. In May 2018, she won a climate change essay competition held by Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. That visibility led Bo Thoren from Fossil Free Dalsland to contact her. At one of their meetings, Thoren suggested that school children could strike for climate. Thunberg tried to recruit others, but "no one was really interested", so she went alone.

  She timed her first strike to precede the 2018 Swedish general election on the 9th of September, and she chose the Riksdag as her backdrop after Sweden's hottest summer in at least 262 years. Her demand was that the Swedish government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement. She remained outside the parliament for three weeks during school hours, every day. After Thunberg posted a photo of her first strike day on Instagram and Twitter, high-profile youth activists amplified the post, and other activists joined her on the second day. A representative of the Finnish bank Nordea quoted one of her tweets to more than 200,000 followers.

  Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of the climate-focused social media company We Don't Have Time, said her strike gained wider public attention only after he posted her photograph on his Facebook and Instagram and a video on his company's YouTube channel. He subsequently invited Thunberg to become an unpaid youth advisor, then used her name and image without her knowledge to raise funds for a for-profit subsidiary, of which he was chief executive. Thunberg received no money from the company and ended her volunteer role once she realized they were making money from her name.

  After the September election, she continued striking on Fridays only. By December, more than 20,000 students held strikes in at least 270 cities. Her speech at the plenary session of the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP24, went viral when she told the world leaders present that they were "not mature enough to tell it like it is". She finished lower secondary school that year with excellent grades: fourteen As and three Bs.

• 4. Sailing Across Oceans

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  In August 2019, Thunberg crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the 60-foot racing yacht Malizia II, equipped with solar panels and underwater turbines. The voyage ran from Plymouth, England, to New York City, and took 15 days, from the 14th to the 28th of August 2019. She chose sailing specifically to send a message that no real sustainable option exists for crossing the oceans. Several crew members had to fly to New York afterward to sail the yacht back to Europe.

  While in the United States, she testified before the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis on the 18th of September 2019, but instead of speaking at length, she delivered an eight-sentence statement and submitted the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius as her evidence. On the 23rd of September, she attended the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, where she joined fifteen other young people at a UNICEF press conference to announce a formal complaint against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey for failing to meet their Paris Agreement emissions targets. The complaint invoked the Third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a mechanism that allows children to bring complaints before the Committee on the Rights of the Child; any resulting suggestions are not legally binding.

  For her return trip across the Atlantic, she sailed aboard the catamaran La Vagabonde, crewed by Australians Riley Whitelum and Elayna Carausu. The detour was necessary because the 2019 climate conference, COP25, was moved on short notice from Santiago, Chile, to Madrid, Spain, owing to civil unrest in Chile. She departed Hampton, Virginia, on the 13th of November 2019 and arrived in Lisbon on the 3rd of December. Speaking before departure, her message was the same as it had been from the start: "unite behind the science and to act on the science."

• 5. Widening the Frame

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  The climate crisis was never the only injustice Thunberg felt compelled to name. In early 2022, she condemned the British firm Beowulf for mining iron on Sami land, calling it colonization and calling on the Swedish government to stop it. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, she began combining her Friday climate protests with opposition to the invasion, standing outside the Russian embassy in Stockholm holding a sign reading "Stand With Ukraine". On the 29th of June 2023, she met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to join a working group addressing ecological damage from the sixteen-month-old invasion.

  In November 2022, Thunberg released The Climate Book, a compilation in which she brought together over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers, meteorologists, engineers, economists, mathematicians, historians, philosophers, and indigenous leaders - who contributed essays on changes to the Earth's climate. She donated her copyright and all royalties to her foundation, taking no personal profit from sales or commercial uses. Published under Penguin's Allen Lane imprint, it is credited to Thunberg as author.

  On the 20th of October 2023, Thunberg posted a photo during her usual Friday strike showing protesters holding signs that included support for Palestinians in Gaza. She was immediately criticized for not condemning the October 7th attacks. The following day she posted: "It goes without saying - or so I thought - that I'm against the horrific attacks by Hamas." In December 2023, she and three researchers affiliated with Fridays for Future Sweden published an opinion piece in The Guardian titled "We won't stop speaking out about Gaza's suffering - there is no climate justice without human rights."

  She has since been detained at pro-Palestinian protests in Copenhagen, at Stockholm University, and in the City of London, where she was arrested on the 23rd of December 2025 for holding a placard reading "I support Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide." She was later released on bail while police investigated offences under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

• 6. Flotillas and Detention

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  In May 2025, Thunberg planned to join a Gaza Freedom Flotilla at a Maltese port. The attempt was cancelled after one of the vessels, the Conscience, was attacked by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta before it could dock, setting it on fire and breaching its hull. A month later, Thunberg joined the June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla aboard the UK-flagged vessel Madleen, organized by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which had a fifteen-year history of similar attempts. Also aboard were activist Thiago Avila and MEP Rima Hassan, who had previously been barred from Israel for her pro-Palestinian stance.

  In the early morning of the 9th of June, Israeli Defense Forces boarded the Madleen in international waters under orders from Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz. At 3:34 AM local time, a video recorded in advance by Thunberg was posted to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition's account on X in the event of seizure. The ship was taken to the port of Ashdod. Thunberg was deported the following day.

  Later that year, Thunberg joined the Global Sumud Flotilla, which set sail from Barcelona on the 31st of August. On the 1st of October 2025, the Madleen was intercepted by Israeli special forces approximately 70 nautical miles off the Gaza coast. Between the 1st and the 3rd of October, a total of 45 vessels were seized and 462 activists detained. Several released activists reported that Thunberg was beaten, paraded while draped in an Israeli flag, and held in conditions described as infested with bedbugs and short on food and water. Israeli authorities denied the allegations. Israeli detention court records state that Thunberg did not report personal mistreatment during her detention. She was deported on the 6th of October 2025 and arrived in Sweden the next day. After her return, she posted images to Instagram about conditions for Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons; one image used inadvertently depicted Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage held by Hamas, and David's family and others condemned her for the misleading use of the photograph.

• 7. Impact and Backlash

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  In February 2019, 224 academics signed an open letter of support inspired by Thunberg's actions. At the January 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, shared a stage with her and announced that every fourth euro in the EU budget from 2021 to 2027 would go toward action to mitigate climate change. Green parties recorded their best ever results in the May 2019 European Parliament elections, raising their seat count from 52 to 72 MEPs, with many gains in northern European countries where young people had taken to the streets.

  A June 2019 YouGov poll in Britain found that public concern about the environment had soared to record levels. That August, publication and sales of children's books about the climate crisis reportedly doubled compared to the previous year, with publishers attributing the surge to the "Greta effect". Margaret Atwood, in November 2019, called Thunberg "the Joan of Arc of the environment". Wealthy philanthropists from the United States donated about $600,000 to support Extinction Rebellion and school strike groups through the Climate Emergency Fund. A 2021 academic study found that people more familiar with Thunberg had higher intentions of taking collective action on climate change, and that stronger collective efficacy beliefs mediated that link.

  The backlash has been persistent and sometimes threatening. In February 2020, X-Site Energy Services of Alberta distributed a sticker depicting a man assaulting a girl labelled "Greta". The then-seventeen-year-old Thunberg posted about it on Twitter, writing: "They are starting to get more and more desperate. This shows that we're winning." X-Site initially denied involvement, then apologized and admitted to distributing the sticker, pledging to destroy known copies. Arron Banks posted on Twitter that "freak yachting accidents do happen in August" in reference to Thunberg, outraging British MPs, celebrities, and academics. Trump mocked her in December 2019 after she was named Time's Person of the Year, tweeting that she should work on her "Anger Management problem". Thunberg responded by changing her Twitter biography to match his description word for word. She applied the same technique after Putin called her "kind" but "poorly informed", and after Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro called her a "brat", at which point she changed her Twitter description to pirralha, the Portuguese word Bolsonaro used.

  Sweden reported a 4% drop in domestic air travel in 2019, a shift many linked to the flight shame movement Thunberg championed. Swedish Railways reported that the number of Swedes taking trains for domestic journeys rose by 8% from the previous year. The BBC has noted that the movement could halve the growth of global air travel, though Airbus and Boeing maintained they still expected growth of around 4% annually through 2035.

• 8. After the Diploma

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  Thunberg graduated from high school in June 2023, wearing the Swedish traditional graduation white dress and white studentmossa cap to her last school strike before receiving her diploma. She said that her "fight has only just begun". Later that year she began a bachelor's program at Stockholm University.

  In January 2023, she was detained by German police during a protest at the opencast coal mine of Garzweiler 2, roughly 9 kilometres from the village of Lutzerath, after police warned the group to move back from the mine's edge. She was released the same day following an identity check. In June 2023, a Malmo District Court found her guilty of disobeying a police order during a Reclaim the Future protest and fined her 2,500 Swedish kronor, equivalent to about US$240. Within hours of the verdict, she attended a similar protest and was again removed by police and criminally charged. A second conviction followed in October, with fines totalling 4,500 kronor, equivalent to about $414.

  In October 2024, Thunberg was convicted by a Swedish court for civil disobedience after ignoring police orders at two demonstrations near the Swedish parliament building in March, fined 6,000 kronor equivalent to US$550, and ordered to pay an additional 1,000 kronor in damages. She boycotted COP29, hosted in 2024 in Azerbaijan under President Ilham Aliyev, citing human rights violations and the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Instead she visited Georgia and Armenia, where she spoke at a demonstration in Yerevan outside the United Nations delegation headquarters, visited the Armenian Genocide memorial, and met with Pink Armenia, an LGBT rights organization.

  On the 24th of November 2025, she and 35 other Extinction Rebellion activists dyed Venice's Grand Canal bright green in a protest timed to coincide with the conclusion of the COP30 climate conference in Brazil. She was banned from the city for 48 hours and fined 150 euros. Luca Zaia, President of Veneto, accused the activists of risking environmental harm; the activists said the dye was environmentally harmless.