ACT NOW AND PLEASE #DO1THING

THE Manchester Evening News today launches its #Do1Thing campaign.

We want to help galvanise and help the work being done by thousands of youngsters across Greater Manchester. Schoolchildren have walked out of classrooms and held demos in Manchester city centre to demand action on climate change.

They were inspired by Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old who started taking time off school to demonstrate outside the Swedish parliament last year.

Emma Greenwood, a 15-year-old from Bury, who lives in Ramsbottom – one of the greenest spots in Greater Manchester – is spearheading the local action She said: “Looking out at the view from Holcombe Hill, you can see Manchester and all the fields... it puts it into perspective how much we’ve got to lose. There’s all these green luscious fields and then I saw, during that really hot summer how damaged it looked, and I thought ‘wow it’s so fragile and it’s so easy to take away.’

“I think my friends and I, we noticed how hot it’s started to get, the fact we can wear our PE kit in school, we were like ‘wow this hasn’t happened before,’ this is something we’re beginning to see first-hand, the effects of climate change. When it starts affecting you personally, that’s when conversations start.

“There’s been an increase in people having asthma, the other thing is noticing what’s happening with plants and animals – last year berries started coming out a good month before they normally would.

“It’s little things like that we’re beginning to notice, there’s a lot more bees, a lot more wasps, the air is hotter, we’re beginning to notice anomalies and things we’ve never seen before.

“That sparks something in young people especially because we spend a lot of time outside.

“’We’re thinking: ‘We are seeing things happen that we haven’t before, what’s the reason?’ We’re beginning to investigate.

“We’re inquisitive, we’re young people and that gives us an advantage because we want to know more, we want to know what we can do to prevent it and what the consequences could be.”

Emma is undeterred by the often negative and cynical reaction from many adults to the climate campaign.

“To adults, there’s a lot of other problems in their lives, there’s money, housing, all these things and to completely scrap all that and put our planet first seems so incomprehensible,” said Emma.

“But in the end that’s what we see as young people. We see how much of a crisis our future is in.

“Sometimes, as adults, they think ‘it won’t really affect us’ and so they won’t prioritise it, so what we need to do is show that it might affect them, we will start to see the effects of climate change drastically in the next 10 to 15 years.

“I think we want adults to see it will affect them and us.”

Emma believes the voting age should be lowered to 16 and that climate change will be the single biggest issue for young voters in the future.

“It’s really, really serious,” she said.

“We’re beginning to see how threatened our future is.”