Funding

Below is our funding broken down per project and where we still require funding. Reach out to us if you have any questions, requests or ideas.

Mapping Fossil Ties to Academia

In 2024, we dedicate a large part of our time to the Mapping Fossil Ties project, in which we:

• Maintain the database, coordinating the Dutch coalition, researching incl. dealing with FOI requests, analyse the results and work with journalists to publish (funded by Aria and the Minor Foundation)
• Compensate student volunteers in our coalition (thanks to Greenpeace NL).
• Organise hackathons to analyse results together with coalition members and the public (Milieudefensie covers the costs).
• Start on a European database of public funding of climate solutions research and involvement of fossil fuel partners, together with dr. Guus Dix (University of Twente) and Jeroen van der Honk (Leiden University) (with seed funding from the University of Twente and the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN)).

Thanks to financial support from Aria, Fossielvrij NL and Milieudefensie in 2023, we:

• Maintained mappingfossilties.org, the world’s first living database of academic relationships with the fossil industry and go-to place for information on Dutch academia’s fossil ties for journalists, action groups, students, university staff, NGOs, policymakers, and the public. It also documents the media debate around these relationships and offers a practical handbook to research them;
• Supported and coordinated decentralised research by a coalition of researchers and action groups, encompassing crowdsourcing information at university campuses, freedom of information (FOI) requests, and providing tools for web crawling;
• Acted as the main point of contact for key stakeholders in the debate of university-fossil ties and provide them with the information they need;
• Identified the key factors (e.g. people, organisations, funding regulations) within the Dutch academic landscape responsible for continued influence of fossil industry;
• Demonstrated our model of coalition-based research and outreach in other countries (kickstarting research coalitions in the UK and Belgium and helping a researcher in Germany).

Researching academic influence on tobacco policy and public health in the Netherlands

We have received a booster research grant from Leiden University to create a historical timeline of key events around the tobacco industry, university and government policies on smoking, number of smokers, and lung cancer patients in the Netherlands. We will investigate whether academic decisions, such as breaking research ties with the industry, affect policy changes and public health. The fossil industry, like the tobacco industry, opposes regulation by spreading disinformation and influencing politics and public opinion. We aim to apply lessons from the past around the tobacco industry to the fossil industry to promote public health.

Increasing engagement with the energy transition and climate justice among migrants

Working with migrant rights organisation Leids Steunloket Migranten, we run a multilingual interactive programme to improve climate literacy among migrants in Leiden, especially those with little to no formal education. We introduce concepts such as climate justice and a just transition, and build support for these. We inform migrants of their democratic rights and the possibilities for climate action, and empower them to take advantage of them and to make their voices heard by those in power. We will also report on the impact of the energy transition and climate justice from the perspective of migrant communities to local and national government, energy transition initiatives and civic organisations. The programme is financially supported by Leiden municipality, Fonds1818 and Milieudefensie.

Climate Obstruction Studies Conference

Together with Martijn Duineveld, Guus Dix and Gertjan Plets, we organise a conference to bring together academics, journalists and NGO researchers who investigate climate obstruction. This conference will be partly funded by a fund that these academics received for their contribution to a book by Robert J. Brulle, J. Timmons Roberts and Miranda C. Spencer about climate obstruction across Europe. We are looking for more funds, also to finance our activities for a Dutch network for Climate Obstruction Studies.

Future research topics

• Analyse what influences media coverage of climate issues; which narratives, language and visual content are used around climate-related coverage in the media and why, building on previous work
• Research and visualise the effect of EU agricultural subsidies on biodiversity in different European countries
• The link between the climate crisis & migration
• The link between debt, money creation, financial risk & climate justice