Teen completes two-week ocean voyage
She set sail to spotlight world’s changing climate
Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist sailing across the Atlantic Ocean for a U.N. climate summit, saw land for the first time early Wednesday as she ended her two-week voyage to New York.
Thunberg anchored off Coney Island on Wednesday and planned to come ashore at North Cove Marina near the World Trade Center later in the day, she said in a tweet.
“Land!! The lights of Long Island and New York City ahead,” Thunberg tweeted at 4 a.m.
Thunberg, 16, wouldn’t fly to New York ahead of the United Nations meeting on climate next month because of emissions from air travel. Instead, she and a crew traveled from Plymouth in the United Kingdom on a zero-emissions racing yacht across the ocean.
Thunberg is set to speak at the opening of the conference along with Secretary-General António Guterres and other youth representatives. The conference of activists and world leaders aims to identify concrete actions that can be taken immediately to reduce warming, U.N. special envoy for the event Luis Alfonso de Alba said Tuesday.
It also comes on the heels of the G-7 Summit in France during which climate was a subject among the world’s most powerful nations and amid recent fires in the Amazon rainforest. President Donald Trump was the only world leader not present at the session on climate, biodiversity and the health of oceans.
The United States will participate in the U.N. summit, but it was not clear to what extent, de Alba said. Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax” and said the U.S. would withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Thunberg has become a leading climate activist. She spearheaded a global demonstration in March in which tens of thousands of students walked out of school to protest inaction on climate change, rising global temperatures that threaten food production and rising sea levels. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, featured on Time magazine’s cover and met the pope.