A teenage schoolgirl led her classmates in a rally to raise awareness about climate change.

Aura Doran, 13, and other pupils from Somersfield Academy stood and chanted at the Crow Lane roundabout in Pembroke yesterday morning and held posters warning about the severity of the climate crisis.

Aura, an M2 pupil, said: “We’re running out of time and we’re running out of resources.

“We have sustainable resources that we’re not using and if people don’t start acting now then it’s not going to matter.

“Our future’s going to be ruined because we’re using fossil fuels and destroying our own home – planet Earth – which we depend on.”

Aura, from St George’s, became interested in environmental problems two years ago after she did a report on Greta Thunberg, a teenage environmental activist from Sweden who raised her concerns in front of the United Nations in 2018.

Aura said that reading about Ms Thunberg, now 19, inspired her to learn more about climate change and take part in rallies.

When 2022 started, she thought it was time that Somersfield Academy became involved in its own climate rally.

Aura said: “We were going to do it in the front of City Hall but it didn’t work out so we just kept preparing.

“On Earth Day I was going to do it but then there was a different rally that I was invited to so we decided that we would have our own rally the following week.”

She added: “We figured that Friday would work because of Greta’s Fridays for Future movement and I wanted to follow along in her footsteps.”

The Fridays for Future movement encourages children to stage walkouts from their school in protest against environmentally-dangerous practices.

Aura said that she and the school contacted police and the Government to see how they could hold a demonstration without disrupting traffic.

She and her friends found posters from previous rallies, invited pupils and faculty and researched other environmental rallies to see what could else could be done.

Aura was joined by 40 pupils, but admitted that she was a bit nervous to lead her own protest, especially because she did not know how many people would come.

She explained: “At first there were only a couple of students so I was a little worried that maybe not everyone was able to make it or maybe no one was going to come to the rally.

“But within five minutes people started showing up, and then 15 minutes later the teachers showed up.”

Aura added: “We crossed the road multiple times, we caught people’s attention with our chants and it went really well.”

Aura said that she hoped to do more rallies in the future and organise beach clean-ups.

She also wanted to challenge other schools to become more environmentally friendly.