‘It cannot be activism as usual’: Kumi Naidoo and Luisa Neubauer on the way forward for climate justice

As the climate movement hits another impasse, activists Luisa Neubauer and Kumi Naidoo explain why we need to mobilise many more people from all walks of life

If a historian were charting the climate movement, she'd probably set its high-water mark so far as September of 2019, when something like 7 million people, most of them young, took to the streets of thousands of cities around the world. To read the accounts that flooded in from around the world is poignant and in some cases heartbreaking (Dom Phillips was providing the updates for the Guardian from Brazil, where Indigenous groups were rallying; this week a suspect admitted to killing Phillips while he was reporting in the Amazon).

I was watching from the wings of a stage setup on New York's Battery, where Greta Thunberg - whose school strike had helped spur this massive wave of climate action - summed up the situation for a quarter million people flooding the streets of lower Manhattan: If you belong to that small group of people who feel threatened by us, we have some very bad news for you, because this is only the beginning. Change is coming whether they like it or not."