NEW YORK — Climate change campaigners gathered in New York’s Times Square on Earth Day to urge action on global warming and cuts in plastics use while volunteers worldwide planted trees and cleared trash to mark the 54th annual celebration of the environment, Reuters reported.

Earth Day this year, officially on Saturday, follows weeks of extreme weather, with temperatures soaring to record highs in Thailand and a heatwave in India, where at least 13 people died of heatstroke at a ceremony last weekend.

Climate scientists have warned that global temperatures could hit all-time highs in 2023 or 2024.

Globally, there was a flurry of activity in the run-up to Earth Day, with events planned in Rome and Boston and major clean-up campaigns at Lake Dal in India’s Srinagar and Florida’s hurricane-hit Cape Coral.

New York City banned cars on streets in at least 31 locations for five hours on Saturday and held concerts in Times Square.

Earlier in the week, US President Joe Biden pledged to increase funding to help developing countries fight climate change and curb deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest during a meeting with top world leaders.

Domestically, he ordered several new measures to protect communities overburdened by pollution, including creating a new White House office of environmental justice and launching a national strategy to prevent plastic pollution.

A report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the planet is on track to warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — a critical threshold for even more damaging impacts — between 2030 and 2035.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” the IPCC has said. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

Meanwhile, Budapest was filled with the sound of jingling bells and clicking gears on Earth Day, as 15,000 cyclists took to the streets of the Hungarian capital.

The parade took them down the banks of the Danube. Their demand was to have a greener city with more bike-friendly urban spaces.

The event was organized by the NGO Hungarian Bicycle Club to demonstrate the need for more bike-friendly urban spaces.

The Budapest roads were designed with a focus on cars and for decades bikers had difficulty navigating on the streets. The cyclist rallies originate from this period.

But gradually the mindset has changed, even the previous conservative mayor developed the network of cycle paths.

The current, green mayor, Gergely Karácsony, quite openly supports bikers, sometimes angering those who try to get around by car in the city.

Earth Day was just the beginning. Every weekend until the end of the summer, the Danube embankment will be given back to pedestrians, runners, cyclists and families with strollers.

Also, thousands of people took to the streets of Montreal to call on the Canadian government to do more to fight climate change, in particular “by moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible”.

“I still believe there is hope, but not with the system we have,” said a young demonstrator.

Earth Day was founded in 1970 in the US by a senator from Wisconsin who organized a national demonstration to raise awareness of environmental issues. — Agencies