They're back! After months of largely online or solitary protests under COVID-19 restrictions, young Fridays for Future activists plan to relaunch "mass" actions this Friday, with groups taking to the streets in places where it is "safe".

"We will continue this fight because we have no other choice. This is a matter of life and death for way too many people," Swedish climate striker Greta Thunberg said.

Campaigners in New York - where the U.N. General Assembly and "Climate Week" events are underway - also unveiled a huge countdown clock Saturday, showing how little time is left (7 years and about 100 days) before global warming likely passes what scientists say is a crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But it's hard to see that action is happening fast enough. 

Tea production in Nepal is suffering from a combination of extreme weather and coronavirus impacts. Illegal mining - and the land invasions and forest loss that come with it - is surging in the Brazilian Amazon. South Africa continues to cling to polluting coal power. On the U.S. West Coast, residents talk of their "disbelief" about the unprecedented scale of wildfires.

Those fires - and flooding as powerful storms batter the southern United States - are pushing climate change higher up the list of issues Americans are worried about, something that could drive votes away from the incumbent president, who has questioned climate science.

Political will to act on climate risks is crucial, economists say, with shifts in government policy - from new taxes on fossil fuels to changes in how public banks invest - key to driving the scale of emissions cuts that voluntary measures alone cannot manage.

Young climate activists from the Philippines to Argentina and Colombia say more ambitious action is just what they hope to spur with their comeback on Friday, a year after millions took to the streets worldwide.

"The climate crisis is already here," they wrote in an opinion piece for us. "This year can be a turning point. We must use the response to this pandemic to begin our just and sustainable reboot."

Take care - more next week!

Laurie

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