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Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied in cities across the globe calling for urgent action to tackle climate change.
The marches come on the eve of a major United Nations climate summit in New York, where world leaders face pressure to make progress on a global pact to counter dangerous global warming.
Darren Mara reports.
(Click on the audio tab above to hear the full report)
This was the protest on the streets of New York City, which organisers say was the biggest climate march in history.
They say around 310,000 people turned out - including celebrities, politicians, business leaders and citizens.
The action in New York was just one of an estimated two-thousand protests worldwide.
Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio all took part in the march.
Standing on Sixth Avenue and wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt, the UN chief said people-power could prove the difference in the campaign to counter climate change.
"Climate change is the defining issue of our time and there is no time to lose if we do not take action now we will have to pay much more. They have raised their voice, they have shown their power to change the mindset of people, and I hope this power and heat will help cool the global temperature rise."
Colourful and boisterous rallies were also held in major cities in Latin America and Europe, and as far away as India.
Rallies were also held in Sydney and in Melbourne, where protest organisers said 30,000 people converged on the city's Treasury Gardens.
They called for a 100 per cent renewable energy target and an end to coal mining.
In the UK, a rally in London that attracted around 40,000 people was a relaxed affair - but no less stirring.
English actress and climate activist Emma Thompson told the crowds the threat from climate change is akin to a Martian invasion.
And she says she's seen for herself the damage climate change is doing.
"I've just been to the Arctic with Greenpeace and whilst I've been aware of climate change for many, many years, seeing the effects of climate change written so clearly on that exquisite landscape put a right rocket up my arse."
On the streets of Berlin, thousands braved the rain to call on world leaders to commit to more comprehensive action to curb dangerous global warming.
United Nations member states have agreed to limit warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels, although they have not suggested a deadline for this to be achieved.
The international day of action was designed to build pressure ahead of a UN-hosted climate change summit in New York on Tuesday.
Some 125 heads of state and government will be in attendance in the first such gathering since the unsuccessful Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.
Daniel Hires, who organised the rally in the German capital, summarises activist demands.
"The industrial nations need to commit to a binding target. There is a certain amount of carbon that we can release into the atmosphere, that's about one trillion tonnes and we are at about 600 million right now, so we have about 400 million to go and we need to put policies into place that will limit that carbon budget. We cannot put more into the earth otherwise we are going to get into the area of runaway climate change where we don't know where it is going to spiral out of control."
The rallies come as Australia's scientific research agency, the CSIRO, says global emissions of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels reached a new record of 36 billion tonnes last year.
The agency says in the latest edition of the collaborative report, the Global Carbon Budget 2014, that the pace of emissions from burning fossil fuels continues to grow at a high rate.
It says fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions are projected to increase 2.5 per cent this year, bringing the total carbon dioxide emissions from all sources above 40 billion tonnes - levels it says are unprecedented in human history.
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