Luisa Neubauer has become the icon of Fridays for Future in Germany. She is a 24 year old activist now considered as the Greta Thunberg of Germany. Student in Geography in Göttingen, she has an amazing eloquence for which she won awards in high school, a strong involvement and values that will and already got her far.
As a reminder, Fridays for Future is an international climate movement that began in 2018 after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every school day for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. Greta posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral. The movement is now in 7’500 cities and has been joined by more than 14 million people. The first event took place in Berlin in December 2018. More than 5,000 young people gathered, while the Ministry of Economy was in the process of deciding to phase out the country’s coal-fired power.
Luisa participated to Ted in September 2019 and presented ‘Why you should be an activist’ which got around two and a half million views. « I dream of a world where geography classes teach about the climate crisis as this one great challenge that was won by people like you and me, » she said. She shares four first steps that anyone, regardless of age, can take to become a climate activist. « This is not a job for a single generation. This is a job for humanity, ».
She is today participating in many emissions to spread her message and ideas and launched her podcast on Spotify called ‘1,5 Grad’ (1,5 Degrees). It is focused on the idea that the climate crisis should be considered as a ‘crisis of people’ because the climate shall be fine in the long term but we won’t.
She explained the name of her podcast, 1.5 degrees Celsius by saying it was linked to the global compromise that was made by signing the Paris Agreement in 2015. « On a diplomatic level, the fact that there is such an international agreement is incredible », she says. « It is also where the world community is drawing the line in terms of destruction and suffering. And it is also the only guarantee for younger generations that promises them to grow old on an inhabitable planet. The science is very clear about the kind of danger zone we enter once we pass 1.5. This is what I committed to fight for, alongside so many others. »
Article by Juliette Blanca