🎓 Learn how academia is used to delay and distort climate action and policy
🔍 Get involved with mapping fossil ties of your university with Solid Sustainability Research & Climate Accountability Lab (University of Miami)
✊🏽 Get active in the campaigns and actions of People and Planet and the Education Climate Coalition to counter the industry’s influence
Pick the day that works best for you:
đź“… Wednesday 10 September 12:00-13:00 UK time: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88508398445
đź“… Tuesday 30 September 18:00-19:00 UK time: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86119207158
👉🏽Join our signal chat to stay up to date and get involved (ask for the link via email).
More information
Research collaborations, endowed professorships, student fellowships and internships, and sponsored student societies. These are a few ways in which fossil fuel companies establish a presence on campus. What does the industry gain from this? And what consequences does it have for research, teaching and academic freedom?
Aaron Pereira and Linda Knoester (Solid Sustainability Research) will give insights into this based on their work with students, staff and action groups in the Netherlands. They coordinated the Dutch Mapping Fossil Ties Coalition, which used web spiders, freedom of information requests, and crowdsourcing to find the ties the fossil industry has with Dutch universities and determine how they use these to stifle criticism, burnish their reputation, and steer research in a direction that benefits industry. Since 2023, 10 of the Netherlands’ 14 universities have adopted policies to restrict or even ban collaborations with the fossil fuel industry.
Together with the Climate Accountability Lab (University of Miami), Aaron and Linda will be investigating fossil-university ties in the UK, building on work started by activists at various universities across the country. If you are a researcher or campaigner, join our signal chat to stay up to date and get involved.
People & Planet’s Fossil Free Careers campaign seeks to disrupt the fossil fuel industry’s recruitment pipeline on university campuses and challenge university complicity in propping up the industries most responsible for fuelling climate breakdown. By supporting, coordinating and empowering a network of student groups, they demand that universities cut their careers and recruitment ties with extractive industries and decline to platform or engage in partnerships with fossil fuel companies. 12 universities across the UK have already committed to Fossil Free Careers, and the campaign has been endorsed by almost 30 Students’ and Worker Unions nationwide.
The Education Climate Coalition is a coalition of climate action groups within the UK educational sector – including schools, colleges and universities. Operating on the principles of mutual aid, horizontal hierarchy and intersectionality; it seeks to provide an avenue for collaboration between student, teacher, staff and academic groups to bolster group capacity, aid in the formation of new groups and projects, and feed the momentum needed for broad social change.
Climate Accountability Lab is a research group directed by Professor Geoffrey Supran at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. The Lab investigates climate change disinformation and propaganda by fossil fuel interests. CAL’s peer-reviewed research elucidates the historical and sociological dimensions of the climate challenge and informs initiatives to hold bad actors accountable.
Solid Sustainability Research is a small, action-oriented research bureau focused on exposing greenwashing and other forms of climate obstruction. Their work specialises in uncovering the ties between the fossil fuel industry and universities, and investigating how fossil fuel interests shape the energy transition through influence on research and media.