Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg was born in Stockholm in 2003, the daughter of an opera singer and an actor. She first learned about climate change at about eight and could not understand why so little was being done about it. At 11 she fell into a depression, stopped speaking to almost everyone outside her family and for months barely ate, losing so much weight that her growth was affected. She was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and selective mutism, and has described autism as her "superpower" because it makes it impossible for her to ignore inconsistency.

She persuaded her parents to stop flying and eating meat. In August 2018, three weeks before the Swedish election, she took a hand-painted sign reading "School strike for climate" and sat alone on the cobbles outside the Riksdag instead of going to school. Photographs spread. By December she was addressing the UN climate conference in Poland, and within a year school strikes under the Fridays for Future name had drawn millions of young people in more than 150 countries.

She refused to fly to speak at the UN in New York in 2019 and crossed the Atlantic in a racing yacht instead. Her speech there, asking world leaders "how dare you", was watched around the world. She was Time's Person of the Year at 16, and became a target of mockery from heads of government and of constant online abuse.

She finished school in 2023 and has since been arrested at protests in several countries, extending her activism to other causes.