Amar Fadillah, 18, stands in front of City Hall carrying various signs made by himself and 10 of his friends with messages on the environment and climate change. The 11 of them staged a protest on Friday urging the city administration to take more real action against climate change.

One poster translates to “You squat here yet you make [Earth] sick. Are humans that vile?”

Another reads “Where do you live?” with a drawing of a crying Earth.

The group may be small in number compared to other protests in Jakarta, but their action resonates globally. They joined the global movement initiated by 16-year-old Swedish student and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, who conducts a weekly “school strike for climate” every Friday. It has garnered a massive global following by students around the world called #FridaysForFuture and #SchoolStrike4Climate.

“We did this by ourselves spontaneously without planning beforehand,” the 18-year-old high schooler told reporters on Friday.

Amar’s idea came two weeks ago when he scrolled through his Instagram feed and found a post about Thunberg riding her bicycle to the Swedish Parliament last August to organize a weekly school strike.

Amar and his schoolmate Muhammad Firdaus Baydowi, 18, then discussed how to organize a protest following in Greta’s footsteps, as in other cities around the world school students also participate in their own school strikes for climate.

The group decided to go to City Hall on Friday as they wanted to convey the message to policymakers in the city administration to take climate change issues more seriously. Especially, he explained, as Jakarta had only 34 days a year when its air quality was categorized as healthy, according to 2018 data from the Environment and Forestry Ministry.

Another protester, 20-year-old college student from Bogor, West Java, Bunga Hikmawati, said she joined the protest as she believed that climate change was a pressing issue that needed to be addressed properly. As urban people’s consumptive behavior contributed to carbon dioxide pollutants, mitigations efforts also needed to be introduced, she added.

“We should be aware of climate change and educate everyone up to the lowest level like elementary school students,” Bunga said.

The movement’s website www.fridaysforfuture.org reported that thousands of students had joined the climate movement in 2,083 cities and 125 countries demanding that their leaders take action against climate change.

Jakarta Environment Agency climate change mitigation and adaptation division head Susi Andriani welcomed the students’ protest, saying that everyone must be aware of climate change issues.

“If all sections of society are working, including the government, citizens, NGOs and the private sector, to mitigate climate change in their own ways, our emissions reduction target can be reached sooner,” Susi told the Post.

The Jakarta administration has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030 according to a 2012 Jakarta Gubernatorial Regulation on greenhouse gas emissions reduction efforts. Data from the agency in 2017 showed that the city had been able to reduce emissions by 7.81 million tons of carbon dioxide, equal to 22.16 percent of the 2030 target, Susi added.

Jakarta has also joined in the central government’s climate friendly (proklim) neighborhood program managed by the Environment and Forestry Ministry aimed at mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Air pollution is one of Jakarta’s persistent environmental problems. According to IQAir AirVisual 2018 World Air Quality Report, Jakarta is the most polluted city in Southeast Asia, with levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) averaging at 45.3 micrograms per cubic meter annually.

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