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Students are fighting climate change, one TikTok video at a time | ABC News

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A generation raised on smartphones is turning the same app used for dance trends into a recruiting tool for tomorrow’s climate strike.

Ahead of the September 20, 2019 global climate strike, ABC News Australia turned its cameras on a corner of the internet most newsrooms still treat as a novelty: TikTok. Millions of students and workers across dozens of countries are expected to walk out of classrooms and offices, and a wave of young Australians is using short, meme-heavy videos to convince their peers to join them.

• The report centers on Tara Bellerose, a 21-year-old student and farmer from Victoria’s highlands who makes TikTok videos urging her followers to attend the climate strike.
• Bellerose says she saw the effects of erratic weather firsthand when unseasonal heavy rain flooded her crops during what forecasters had predicted would be a dry season.
• Her videos mix footage sourced from outlets like National Geographic with animals and scenic imagery, a formula she says keeps young viewers watching long enough to hear the message.

A Farmer’s Case for Urgency

Bellerose isn’t a professional activist or a media personality — she’s a student who also works the land, which is exactly why ABC News built its segment around her. She told the network that the flooding she watched swamp her own crops, in a season that was supposed to be dry, is the kind of concrete disruption that turns an abstract issue into a personal one. That lived experience is what she says she tries to translate into fifteen-second clips.

Her approach is deliberately unglossy: pair an arresting nature shot or a shot of an animal with a blunt point about a warming climate, then tell viewers where to be on September 20. It’s a far cry from a lecture hall or a press conference, but it’s built for an app where attention spans are measured in seconds, not minutes.

Combining appealing pictures and pets with an urgent message, Bellerose says, is what gets young viewers to actually stop scrolling.

TikTok Emerges as Organizing Tool

The choice of platform isn’t incidental. TikTok’s format rewards short, visually punchy clips that spread fast among teenagers and young adults who don’t necessarily follow traditional news outlets or established environmental groups. For organizers trying to fill the streets on a single Friday, that reach matters more than polish.

ABC News frames this as part of a broader pattern already visible in coverage of other environmental strains, from the wildfires devastating the Pacific Northwest to agricultural disruptions like the locust swarms threatening livelihoods across Africa, Asia and the Middle East — visible, tangible disruptions that young creators like Bellerose are translating into content their peers will actually watch rather than scroll past.

Defined Objectives of the Strike

The September 20 walkout is designed as the opening salvo of a global week of action, timed to land just before the United Nations Climate Action Summit. For Bellerose and the creators ABC News spoke to, the TikTok campaign isn’t the protest itself — it’s the recruitment drive, aimed at pulling students out of classrooms who might never have heard about the strike from a flyer or a news broadcast.

That distinction matters. The videos aren’t meant to explain climate science in depth; they’re meant to get a thumb to stop swiping long enough to register a date, a location, and a reason to show up.

Bellerose’s account, flooded crops in a season that was supposed to be dry, is the kind of detail she leans on precisely because it’s hers. Whether the strike numbers on September 20 match the scale organizers are hoping for, her bet is that a farm kid with a phone and some borrowed National Geographic footage can move more classmates than another op-ed ever will.