"The climate emergency—which threatens every person on the planet into the foreseeable future—is at least as serious a threat as a global pandemic and similarly requires urgent international action."

"The climate crisis has not disappeared," said Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. "It's the opposite—it's even more urgent now than it was before."

"Virtually no child's life will be unaffected" by the climate emergency, said the director of UNICEF.

The Swedish campaigner says insufficient goals and empty rhetoric represent the "biggest elephant there's even been in any room."

NOAA warned that carbon dioxide and methane "continued their unrelenting rise in 2020."

"It is truly groundbreaking," Greta Thunberg said of the growing concentration of the heat-trapping gas. "And I don't mean that in a good way."

Returning to the streets a year into the coronavirus pandemic, youth campaigners are calling for "no more empty promises."

"If we stand back and do nothing, letting global warming prevail, we will lose our identity, and the town we love—as well as many others around the world—will cease to exist as we know it," said the mayor of Salla.

The global crisis, says the youth leader, "cannot be solved without system change. That's no longer an opinion. That's a fact."

"We need to face the full picture. We are facing an existential crisis, and this is a crisis that we can not buy, build, or invest our way out of."