Abstract
Thousands of universities have made climate emergency declarations; however the higher education sector is not rising to the collective challenge with the urgency commensurate with scientific warnings. Universities are promoting an increased focus on sustainability through their research, teaching and their own institutional footprints. However, we suggest that such initiatives will be insufficient to catalyse the required transformations in our societies and economies because of (i) the time lags inherent in education and research pathways to impact, and (ii) their failure to address either real-world political processes or the forces invested in maintaining the status quo. We therefore suggest that academics should move from publications to public actions and engage in advocacy and activism to affect urgent and transformational change. We discuss the barriers to engagement in advocacy that academics face, and propose a number of actions that universities should adopt to help overcome them. These include explicitly recognising advocacy as part of the work mandate of academic staff by altering work allocation models, facilitating engaged research sabbaticals, altering hiring and promotion policies, and providing training to enhance the effectiveness of engagement. In addition, universities must defend the right of academics to engage in protest and push back against emerging threats to academic freedom. Such actions would strengthen a rich tradition of academic protest and enhance the contribution of universities to the public good in areas well beyond sustainability, for example race and social justice (Black Lives Matter, decolonising education) and public health.
Highlights
EMERGENCY ON PLANET EARTHPlanetary heating threatens the collapse of human civilisation and ecosystems worldwide (Trisos et al, 2020; Richards et al, 2021), a situation so severe that over 11,000 scientists have declared “clearly and unequivocally” that the Earth faces a climate emergency (Ripple et al, 2020)
An emergency is an urgent situation requiring immediate action, yet, despite thousands of Higher Education (HE) institutions around the world having issued their own “climate emergency declaration” [UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), 2019] and the widespread recognition that universities play a key role in contributing to the public good, the HE sector is not rising to the collective challenge with the urgency commensurate with the warnings–despite the fact that these warnings emanate largely from academics working in HE–and is largely continuing with business as usual
Given the urgency of the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE), we suggest that universities must expand their conception of how they contribute to the public good, and explicitly recognise engagement with advocacy as part of the work mandate of their academic staff
Summary
Planetary heating threatens the collapse of human civilisation and ecosystems worldwide (Trisos et al, 2020; Richards et al, 2021), a situation so severe that over 11,000 scientists have declared “clearly and unequivocally” that the Earth faces a climate emergency (Ripple et al, 2020). Advocacy can be defined as publicly adopting a position and working to promote it, for example through lobbying, campaigning and engaging and organising the public; activism is a subset of advocacy that uses more direct forms of action to influence policy, such as protest and non-violent civil disobedience. Labour unions such as the University and College Union in the UK have an important role in both defending the rights of members to engage in civil disobedience, and providing them with the security to feel able to do so Such a defence of academic freedom must not be limited to guaranteeing the rights of staff from an institutional point of view. While we recognise that some of the suggestions are rather incremental and managerial, and themselves unsuited to an emergency context, we offer them as a starting point for further discussion and anticipate that the roles of academics and universities will continue to evolve through experimentation and public debate as the planetary emergency deepens
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