Climate activists including Greta Thunberg disrupt airline's shareholders meeting

IZMIR, Türkiye

Five climate activists from the Fridays for Future movement including Greta Thunberg disrupted Scandinavian Airlines’ (SAS) general meeting of shareholders in Sweden on Monday, saying the company is projecting a false image of environmental sustainability.

They were allowed to attend the meeting at the company's headquarters in Frosundavik near Stockholm because Fridays for Future holds shares in the airline.

Other participants demanded that the activists leave the venue or “respect the agenda.”

Some of the activists held up banners, including one saying “Stop lying.”

Thunberg addressed SAS CEO Anko van der Werff directly without asking permission.

She said there are no environmentally sustainable flights, asking what SAS could do to reduce its flights in the coming years.

"SAS has done a lot to comply with the Paris Agreement and we have acted in such a way as to be in line with the guidelines set out in the agreement. Flying is important. It is important to bring the world together,” said der Werff.

Thunberg questioned how the SAS board can sleep at night while people, according to her, are already dying from the climate crisis.

"Why don't you respect our future? Why do you only rely on clichés? You don't listen to us or to the research," she said.

Young people from the movement including Thunberg demonstrated Monday morning outside prior to the meeting, saying the company lacks realistic plans to reduce its emissions.

Kevin Anderson, professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, said in a joint press release with the movement that a reduction in flying is necessary.

"Aviation is the only sector where there are no technical possibilities to reduce total emissions on the timeline of the scientific emission budgets associated with the Paris Agreement. The only realistic option for the sector to do its fair share in keeping the temperature rise below 1.5 to 2C is to drastically reduce demand; anything less than this is just another scam," he said.

Fridays for Future is a youth-led movement that started in 2018 after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament, or Riksdag, in Stockholm every school day for three weeks to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis.

The Paris Agreement is an international climate agreement that was concluded in 2015 during the UN Climate Conference and states that the global temperature increase must be kept below 2C and that efforts must be made to limit it to 1.5C (2.7F).

Last week, Fridays for Future demonstrated outside the Riksdag. Thunberg was then taken away by the police.