Green travel across the Atlantic

Greta Thunberg

Swedish 16-year old Greta Thunberg has become quite the disrupter since she started a school strike in front of the Swedish parliament in August 2018, with her initiative for climate action having inspired school strikes in more than 150 countries.

She has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize, she was on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in 2019, and now she is bringing her show to the USA, and true to her cause, she is traveling from Europe to the New York not by plane but by sailboat.

Coming to attend the forthcoming UN Climate Action Summit, she and her dad have joined Team Malizia and will do the crossing on board their IMOCA 60 foiling monohull Malizia II. While this sailing team aims to sail in the Vendee Globe 2020 and The Ocean Race 2021, Greta aims to continue pounding her drum.

Outfitted with solar panels and underwater turbines to allow for a zero-carbon, it is the ideal alternative to airplanes and the tremendous amount of emissions they release high-up in the atmosphere. For all the international sailing regattas that vie for leadership roles on behalf of the environment, their re-usable water bottles don’t quite make up for their worldwide travel.

Expect Greta to make quite the splash when she arrives in the States, and her transatlantic voyage should be a dominant story line.

“We will make sure she will reach New York in the safest way possible,” notes Boris Herrmann, co-founder of Team Malizia. “I am thrilled that our sport ambition and sailing project can play a small but hopefully important role in increasing awareness for the most important challenge humanity faces today.”

Greta lives in Stockholm with her family and finished comprehensive school earlier this summer (9th grade). She is now taking a gap year from school to allow her to take her climate campaign to the Americas.