Time 2019 Person of the Year is Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg has rejected accolades for her activism, saying awards are not what the environmental movement needs.

But on Wednesday, the Swedish 16-year-old, who has mobilized millions of people to fight climate change and condemned leaders’ inaction, picked up another honor that acknowledges her impact.

Thunberg is Time’s Person of the Year — the magazine’s youngest ever, reports Washington Post.

“She became the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet this year, coming from essentially nowhere to lead a worldwide movement,” Time Editor in Chief Edward Felsenthal said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Thunberg represents a broader phenomenon of young people pushing for change, Felsenthal said, pointing to the Parkland, Fla., high school students who became a leading voice on gun control as well as another finalist for 2019 Person of the Year, the Hong Kong protesters who have spent months in the streets urging democratic reform.

Time’s other finalists were three people at the center of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump: the president himself, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint helped set the impeachment inquiry in motion.

Thunberg — who scolded a United Nations assembly of the powerful in the fall, declaring “How dare you” — was named Person of the Year while she was giving another speech at a U.N. climate summit in Madrid.

This time, she did not reject the accolade, but shared credit with “climate activists everywhere.”

Time’s Person of the Year distinction is not necessarily a positive award. Rather, it is one that recognizes “the man, woman, group or concept that has had the most influence on the world during the previous 12 months.” Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, for instance, was named Time’s Man of the Year in 1938.