18-year-old British activist stages climate change protest on floating ice in Arctic Ocean

An 18-year-old British activist, Mya-Rose Craig, stood on a floating sheet of ice with hundreds of drifting blocks of white in her background as she staged a protest against climate change in the Arctic Ocean.

For Craig, getting to the destination involved a two-week quarantine in Germany, followed by a three-week journey to the edge of the sea ice.

Craig, who is from southwest England, strongly believes that humans have failed to take the urgent action needed to tackle global warming. She chose to voice her concerns at the Arctic Ocean, holding a placard reading "Youth Strike for Climate".

Such demonstrations, particularly ones involving youngsters, were made famous by Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg and they are slowly returning after the coronavirus outbreak.

Craig was quoted as saying: "I’m here to...try and make a statement about how temporary this amazing landscape is and how our leaders have to make a decision now in order to save it. I absolutely think that my generation has always had to think about climate change which is why as we've got older there's been this massive wave of just this need for change, this demand for change when we realised the grown-ups aren’t going to solve this so we have to do it ourselves."

Craig uses the username Birdgirl online and even has a blog about her bird-watching experiences which has thousands of followers. She has even travelled hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle, aboard a Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise.

Taking to her Twitter account, Craig, @BirdgirlUK, wrote: “Time is running out. The Arctic is melting, and could be gone by the time I’m in my 30s, and we need our leaders to make a decision now. I did the most northerly climate strike ever in the Arctic to convey my desperation and the urgency of the issue.”

Craig told Reuters that people should not dismiss activists like Thunberg by calling her generation rebellious.

Additionally, she wants those in power to stop treating climate change as a low-priority issue.

"It’s everything now and it has to be treated like that," she was quoted as saying.