Climate Justice Principles

The climate justice principles that guide the Climate Justice Universities Union include:

1. The climate crisis is a symptom of extractive and exploitative systems that need to be transformed.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out.
5. Solidarity against violent oppression, militarisation, and the material and knowledge‑based legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

Manifesto

Union members have co-developed a 12-point Manifesto that is a working document last updated in September 2026.

The Climate Justice Universities Union calls on staff, students, administrators, alumni, policymakers, communities and the wider public to support and advance the following collective goals:

1. Acknowledge the emergency. We call on Higher Education Institutions to declare a climate and ecological emergency, commit to climate justice principles, and act accordingly across their teaching, research, operations, procurement, community outreach and public engagement activities.

2. Reclaim the public good mission of Higher Education. Universities must reclaim their trusted position as ‘anchor institutions’ of their local communities and use their educational, research, and financial capacities to create sustainable, just, and more democratic local economies and climate resilient local communities.

3. Make universities more democratic. Install transparent, inclusive, democratic, modes of governance within the university and encourage the co-design of teaching and learning priorities with students.

4. Climate Justice education for all. Ensure all students and every member of the institution has an understanding of the causes, consequences, and responses to the worsening planetary crisis, and the knowledge and skills required to live in a climate-changed world and to be change-agents and leaders for a sustainable and just future.

5. Resist Big Tech. Resist the uncritical rollout and widespread use of displacement artificial intelligence and reduce reliance on big tech in higher education and beyond.

6. Resist corporate capture. End university partnerships with extractive and destructive industries, and resist corporate capture and the financialisation of universities and academic research.

7. Promote engaged research and scholarship. Support and encourage scholar-activism of staff, students and administrators aligned with climate justice principles. Promote research, teaching and community engagement activities that seek societal transformation toward just, equitable, democratic, decolonised, stable, and healthy futures for all.

8. Demonstrate climate-proof decision making. Ensure all key investments, procurements, teaching, research, and university management decisions are “climate and sustainability-proof,” while also ensuring decisions decrease gender, class, race, and other injustices and inequalities.

9. Refuse militarisation. Ensure Higher Education institutions, research, and scholarship are not complicit in militarisation, war, genocide, and violent oppression, and work to confront legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

10.  Practice solidarity. Support, welcome, and work in community with marginalised and oppressed peoples, including those who have experienced forced displacement.

11.  Reduce universities’ planetary impacts. Work towards locally-sourced, ecologically sustainable, regenerative, and socially responsible consumption including plant-based food and the repair and reuse of materials. Examine all procurement, identify alternative consumption models including shared resource models. Normalise low carbon and slower modes of travel, while also recognising that this may not be possible for all staff and students.

12.  Institute a culture of care. End extractive and harmful working practices and economic precarity among staff and students and support transformative public investments in healthcare, housing, public transport, care work, education and other basic services.