The climate justice principles that guide the Climate Justice Universities Union include:
- The climate crisis is a symptom of extractive and exploitative systems that need to be transformed.
- Decarbonisation and emissions‑reduction efforts must be linked with transformative public investments in healthcare, housing, public transport, care work, education, and other basic services that every community needs and deserves.
- Local, regenerative, and community‑focused production of food, energy, and other necessities must be cultivated and supported to improve wellbeing and restore ecological health and biodiversity of land and water.
- Fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out.
- Solidarity against violent oppression, militarisation, and the material and knowledge‑based legacies of colonialism and imperialism.
The Collective Approach of the Climate Justice Universities Union
We believe transformative social change toward a more just, healthy future for all is possible.
- We promote cultures of care.
- We endorse fossil fuel phaseout and the international Fossil Fuel Non‑Proliferation Treaty, and an end to university complicity in militarisation.
- We believe in integrating diverse forms of knowledge, including feminist and indigenous knowledge.
- We resist the corporate capture of higher education by extractive industries for profit‑seeking motives, including fossil fuel and adjacent industries and Big Tech.
- We support meaningful equality, diversity, and inclusion, seek to advance gender justice, and challenge toxic masculinity.
- We believe climate justice extends to all forms of social justice including, but not limited to economic justice, gender justice, climate justice, racial justice, housing justice, energy justice, food justice, intergenerational justice, technology justice, water justice, and more.