Meet the 19-Year-Old Belgian Activist Taking a Global Outlook on the Climate Crisis

In the opening scenes of I Am Greta, the new documentary on Greta Thunberg and the school strike movement, we see her as she was back in the summer of 2018. Sitting on a Stockholm street corner outside Stockholm’s Parliament House, Thunberg holds her now world-famous “skolstrejk för klimatet” sign as passers-by glance down at her with disinterest. It’s an image that was, over the following months, slowly beamed around the world—eventually inspiring millions upon millions of young people to join the “school strike for climate” movement, with the protests throughout 2019 taking place across 150 countries.

Yet as the documentary makes clear, Thunberg was far from alone in igniting the movement’s still-roaring flame. In December 2018, the day after Belgium neglected to sign a new declaration on addressing climate change at the COP24 summit in Katowice, Poland, then 17-year-old Belgian student Anuna de Wever was searching for organizing strategies when they came across Thunberg’s approach. De Wever began drumming up local interest online before staging their first protest in the same mold two weeks later on the streets of Brussels. That protest became one of the first international branches of the school strike movement that would go on to sweep the globe.

“First there were 3,000 people, then 15,000, then 35,000 and Brussels became this international thing with journalists from all over Europe coming to interview us and understand how it happened,” de Wever remembers, noting that this rapid growth and widespread amplification of the movement and its message was very much their plan of action from the beginning. “I was really inspired by what Greta did, so I decided to scale it up and get as many people as possible involved. For me, that was the most obvious solution—to build a lot of pressure very quickly.”

Like Thunberg, de Wever’s ability to articulate the sweeping crises imposed by climate change in a way that is both impassioned and informed speaks of a perceptiveness far beyond their years. (Now 19, de Wever identifies as gender nonbinary.) For de Wever, too, the cult of personality that has been formed around them comes with challenges similar to that of Thunberg, as vividly explored in I Am Greta. Within their native Belgium, de Wever is very much the movement’s figurehead. Internationally, meanwhile, the press regularly mentions them in the same breath as Thunberg, along with Adélaïde Charlier and Luisa Neubauer, considered their counterparts in France and Germany respectively.

Not all of the attention, of course, is positive. How does de Wever deal with the online abuse that is inevitably slung their way? “It can be hard,” de Wever says. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with Greta about how to deal with this. I’ve gotten a lot of death threats and a lot of people said they would come and rape me or beat me up.” One particularly challenging moment came last year when de Wever was invited to speak at Belgium’s annual Pukkelpop music festival. While giving a speech alongside fellow climate activist Nic Balthazar, de Wever was aggressively heckled by a far-right group who had specifically targeted their event; later, they were harassed and physically attacked in the festival’s campsite.

“I literally heard them yelling, ‘Where's Anuna, we’re going to kill her. We know she’s here,’” de Wever remembers. “As an 18-year-old, that was not fun to hear. It’s hard and it’s unnecessary, but at the end of the day, it’s not affecting what we do. I will never stop what I do, Greta will never stop what she does. No activists will, because we know what we're doing is way more important than those hate comments.” Even under the limitations placed by the pandemic, de Wever and their peers have kept up the momentum. When school strikes resumed in September, the strictly limited number of attendees adhered to guidelines for gatherings depending on their location, while de Wever and Thunberg also conducted a masked, socially-distanced meeting with Angela Merkel in Berlin back in August to reiterate the urgency of their cause.

de Wever says their ability to tune out from the abuse is thanks to the solidarity and safety of the network of young activists with which they surround themselves—even as they’re constantly aware that the movement is much bigger than their own community. For de Wever, it’s increasingly important to emphasize that it’s a truly global crisis. “Obviously it helped me to get a platform and to inform people and I absolutely love that, but I also hate to be considered a key figure when there are so many more urgent voices,” de Wever adds. The future of the climate movement, de Wever hopes, will see public and media attention turned not just to the prominent European figureheads, but also to those living in areas of the world that have already been profoundly affected by climate change and whose voices often go unheard.

“One of the biggest things we've been trying to do is to pass the mic to people in the global south,” de Wever says. de Wever has been lending their voice to a number of campaigns that are aiming to shift the focus on ecological catastrophes happening right now around the world, and amplifying the voices of those on the front lines, which means spotlighting everything from collapsing ice shelves in Arctic Canada to the flooding of the Nile that has devastated the city of Khartoum in Sudan. de Wever’s vocal support for the Black Lives Matter movement has also included reminders that the outsize impact of the environmental crisis on communities of color around the world is a product of structural racism too.

“I’m white, I’m privileged, I live in Europe—we need people on the frontlines telling the stories, because they can tell it way better than us,” de Wever adds. “We are talking about our future all the time, but there are people right now, millions of people that are fighting every day to survive the effects of climate change. People in the Amazon forest, people in Uganda, they know what climate change really is, so they should have a voice.”

All the same, as I Am Greta makes abundantly clear, it’s both the unique perspective and inexhaustible energy of young people like de Wever that has so energized the world to take the climate crisis more seriously over the past two years. In those first scenes of the documentary, filmmaker Nathan Grossman includes footage of a middle-aged woman walking up to Thunberg as she sits on the street in Stockholm before proceeding to tell her that she should go to school and learn how to change the system via a more conventional route. “For us old people, it’s too late,” the woman adds. Thunberg’s typically concise reply? “It’s never too late.”

de Wever agrees that their generation holds the power to enact real change to combat an impending environmental disaster. “Young people can think more critically,” de Wever says. “They haven’t lived in this system all their lives, so they can look at it and say, ‘Okay, actually this is completely wrong.’ There are so many people telling me, 'You should just chill, you're young. You need to enjoy your childhood, go party every now and then.' But there is something huge ahead of us and there are so little people that actually see it. Climate change is a black and white topic, either we make it or we don’t—and for us, it's the only thing that matters.”