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The sailboat, La Vagabonde, will shepherd
Thunberg to the Port of Lisbon, and from
there she will travel to Madrid, where the
United Nations is hosting this year’s climate
conference. It is the last such summit before
nations commit to new plans to meet a
major deadline set by the Paris Agreement.
Unless they agree on transformative action
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the
world’s temperature rise since the Industrial
Revolution will hit the 1.5°C mark—an
eventuality that scientists warn will expose
some 350 million additional people to drought
and push roughly 120 million people into
extreme poverty by 2030. For every fraction
of a degree that temperatures increase,
these problems will worsen. This is not
fearmongering; this is science. For decades,
researchers and activists have struggled to
get world leaders to take the climate threat
seriously. But this year, an unlikely teenager
somehow got the world’s attention.
Thunberg began a global movement by
skipping school: starting in August 2018, sheA LONG VOYAGE
Thunberg writes in her
journal on the train as
she travels from Lisbon
to Madrid for a U.N.
climate conference