The team who sailed the Atlantic with teenage eco warrior Greta Thunberg

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg made her two-week voyage across the Atlantic with the help of a sailing team led by Princess Grace Kelly’s grandson.

Monaco-born Pierre Casiraghi, 31, who owns The Malizia II vessel, offered to  accompany the 16-year-old Swede on her voyage from Plymouth, England to New York, where they arrived Thursday.

He contacted her to offer a carbon neutral way of traveling from the United Kingdom to New York, where she is due to speak at the UN Climate Summit in September where she will present plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Thunberg and Casiraghi were joined by an eclectic crew, which included her actor father Svante Thunberg and documentary filmmaker Nathan Grossman and German skipper Boris Hermann.

The boat was captained by Boris Herrmann, a professional race skipper from Germany who is Pierre Casiraghi’s sailing partner.

The yacht had no kitchen, no heating, no fridge and no bathroom and cramped living conditions.  

Thunberg documented parts of her journey on Twitter, where she included videos of choppy weather conditions, photos of herself and the crew, and commentaries about climate change. 

Casiraghi founded Team Malizia in 2016, initially with a ten meter GC32 catamaran and subsequently a different vessel. 

Here are the team who were on board and completed the 15-day voyage across the Atlantic and arrived in New York on Thursday.

Pierre Casiraghi  

Pierre Casiraghi, the son of Princess Caroline of Monaco and her second husband Stefano Casiraghi, owns one of few racing sailing boats in the world with a ‘totally neutral carbon footprint.’

Princess Caroline is the eldest daughter of Prince Rainier III and his wife, the Hollywood actress Grace Kelly. 

Casiraghi was reported to have approached Thunberg, who wanted an environmentally friendly way of crossing the Atlantic as she is due speak at the U.N. Climate Change Summit next month.  

Casiraghi founded Team Malizia in 2016, initially with a ten meter GC32 catamaran and subsequently a different vessel. 

He is also Vice-President of the Yacht Club de Monaco, and lives in the sovereign municipality with his wife, Italian TV Personality Beatrice Borromeo and their two young children.  In addition to his royal duties, he is also a humanitarian and is involved in the construction company Engeco, which his father founded.

Casiraghi and his sailing partner Boris Herrman handled the sailing and shared one bunk, while Thunberg, her father, and Grossman occupied the remaining three. 

Casiraghi told The Times about the voyage: ‘We are probably one of the few boats in the world that is totally zero fossil fuel. 

‘They had a lot of questions and they had been exploring different kinds of boats to get across. We explained this is a racing boat, that there is little comfort on the boat, but she seems fine with that.’

Boris Herrmann 

German offshore sailor Boris Herrman become the first German to compete in the Vendee Globe 2020, sailing solo non-stop around the world on Malizia.

The Malizia project was founded in 2017 by Pierre Casiraghi and Boris Herrmann with the support of the Yacht Club de Monaco in order to realize a dream of sailing in the Vendee Globe and have Monaco’s commitment to the sport realized through this ambition.

In 2018, Boris and Pierre founded the Malizia Ocean Challenge project.

The initiative aims to combine sailing, science and education to get children fascinated about sailing and ocean topics whilst teaching them about climate change and to love our seas with our kids’ ocean challenge kit.

On Team Malizia’s Instagram page, Herrmann and the other team members said: ‘Thank you to everyone who made this possible – the different teams that pulled together to make this a reality and to the partners and sponsors who gave their permission. 

‘Every person involved made this work and helped to spread the message #unitebehindthescience.’

On Day Four, the conditions onboard the Malizia II were described as  ‘like camping on a roller coaster.’  Both Herrmann and Casiraghi are accomplished sailors and have worked together and known each other for a number of years. 

 Nathan Grossman 

Thunberg was accompanied on her trans-Atlantic voyage by filmmaker Nathan Grossman of B-Reel Films, who will document the journey. 

She also brought audiobooks and has notebooks to fill and made videos which she uploaded on to her Instagram page. 

He is working on a documentary called  Greta Vs Climate, which charts the young climate activists journey since she began her protests last year.

The Swedish director of B-Reel was invited to pitch the film several months ago, and it became even more topical on March 14 when Thunberg, 15, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Greta Vs Climateis already backed by the Swedish Film Institute. 

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the world faces a climate emergency and challenged leaders to come to the 193-member United Nations next month with concrete, realistic plans on how to better tackle the emergency.

‘We absolutely need to keep the rise of temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius to the end of the century and to be carbon neutral in 2050 and to have a 45 per cent reduction of emissions by 2030,’ he told reporters in France on Monday.

Thunberg plans to attend the 25th United Nations Climate Change conference in Santiago, Chile, in December, and intends to make her way there without using air travel. 

She has taken a year off school to campaign for climate action in the Americas with plans to also visit Mexico and Canada.

Svante Thunberg   

Greta’s father is Svante Thunberg, an actor and author named after Svante Arrhenius.  

He was the Nobel prize-winning scientist who first calculated how carbon dioxide emissions could lead to the greenhouse effect.

Her mother Malena Ernman, a very well-known opera singer. Ernman has published a book in which she detailed her family’s struggle with raising two daughters with special needs. 

Both Greta and her younger sister, Beata, have been diagnosed with autism and other conditions. 

Thunberg developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade.

In an interview with The New Yorker in October last year, Greta claimed: ‘I see the world a bit different, from another perspective.’I have a special interest. It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.’ 

Thunberg claimed she her found a interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade. 

‘They were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food.

”I asked why and they explained about climate change. And I thought this was very strange. If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn’t be talking about anything else. But this wasn’t happening.’

Greta Thunberg

The 16-year-old became a global celebrity last year when she refused to go to school in the weeks before Sweden’s general election to highlight the impact of climate change and to put pressure on politicians to do something about it. 

She continued her school strike on Fridays after the election, spurring thousands of young people around the world to follow suit. 

Since then, she’s met the pope, spoken at Davos and attended anti-coal protests in Germany.

She is now taking a year off school to attend the events in North and South America and meet with some of the people most affected by climate change. 

She decided not to fly to New York because of the emissions caused by air travel and plans to use the least carbon-intensive methods of travel available as she continues her trip.

Before she left Plymouth she said: ‘By this journey I hope to increase awareness among people, to spread information and communicate the science about what is really going on so people can understand what is really going on with the climate and ecological crisis,” she said. 

‘That is what I am hoping to achieve with everything and that will also lead to international opinions so that people come together and put pressure on the people in power so that they will have to do something.’

The 16-year-old Swede led a protest march in front of the United Nations as she called for greater action on climate change as she arrived in New York. 

She was surrounded by hundreds of youth activists chanting ‘fossil lobbyists have got to go’ and ‘it’s too hot’ – a reference to global warming. 

Thunberg urged ‘everyone who cares about our future’ to join her when world leaders gather in New York next month.

The activist has led weekly Fridays for Future, strikes carried out by schoolchildren which have taken place in 100 cities worldwide. 

The teenager became the face of the climate activism movement last year after she started missing school to force Swedish politicians to pay attention to what she calls ‘a war on nature’.