Teenage activist Greta Thunberg is set to sail across the Atlantic for the second time in just a few months after a global climate meeting was moved to Spain.
The Swedish 16-year-old travelled from Europe to the US across the ocean a high-tech racing yacht for the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York.
And she was due to continue on her journey by going to Santiago, Chile, for a global climate meeting in December, but it was cancelled at short notice and the meeting moved to Spain, forcing her to look for a way to head back to Europe.
The trip could take two to four weeks, and November is considered off-season for sailing across the Atlantic – but the Swede is refusing to fly because of the carbon price of plane travel.
She will leave on La Vagabonde, a 15-metre long catamaran whose green credentials include solar panels and hydro-generators for power.
The owners of the boat are Riley Whitelum and Elayna Carausu, an Australian couple who have an 11-month-old son named Lenny. The family, which has a large online following, responded to Ms Thunberg's call on social media for a carbon-free ride to Europe while an expert sailor, Nikki Henderson, is also coming along.
As Ms Thunberg spoke on Tuesday in Hampton, Virginia, the temperature had dipped to around 4C as sleet turned into light snow.
"I'm looking forward to it, just to be able to get away and recap everything and to just be disconnected," she said.
Ms Thunberg just finished a nearly three-month trip through North America, where she gave an impassioned speech before the United Nations and took part in climate strike rallies and protests from California to Colorado to North Carolina.
She has become a symbol of a growing movement of young climate activists after leading weekly school strikes in Sweden that inspired similar actions in about 100 cities worldwide.
The activist has also drawn criticism from conservative commentators in the US as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin. But she brushed it off during her round of back-to-back interviews in the catamaran on Tuesday.
"It should be the adults who take that responsibility," she said. "But it feels like the adults and the people in power today are not."
When she looks back on her time in the US and Canada, Ms Thunberg said the things that stick out the most include a glacier in Canada's Jasper National Park that is destined to disappear "no matter what we do".
She was also surprised at how much she was recognised.
"There are always people who come up to me and ask for selfies and so on," she said. "So, that really gives you an idea of how big the climate movement has reached."
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