Utrecht Young Academy declares Climate Crisis

On the week of 20-27 September 2019, “Fridays for Future” school strikers have called for a global climate strike. Millions of adults worldwide are stepping up to support them and to kickstart renewed action all over the world. 

The Utrecht Young Academy (UYA), as an institution, is joining hundreds of scientists in the Netherlands, and thousands worldwide, to state: the concerns of the climate strikers are justified. 

We therefore sign the consensus statement initiated by an alliance of scientists. We especially emphasize that “the [current] measures to combat and adapt to climate change are far from adequate”, and “as scientists and scholars, besides providing knowledge, we have a moral obligation to inform and warn society about the state of the planet.”  

We find it evident that the public support for science comes with the mutual agreement that in times of uncertainties and societal challenges, the scientific community dedicates all in its power to finding solutions and identifying risks.

We believe actions necessary to face the climate and ecological disruptions should be taken both at the personal and at the institutional level.

At the Utrecht Young Academy, it is in our mission to engage with academia, policymakers, and society, beyond our formal duties of research and teaching. We understand now that we should pay much more attention to this defining issue of our generation on how to understand and mitigate the climate and ecological crisis.

To face this challenge, we now declare climate crisis. We start acting on this by the following three actions:

• UYA will seek direct communication channels to inform everyone in society about societal and ecological consequences of climate change and loss of biodiversity.
• UYA will support scientific and scholarly research that is focused on building resilience to climate change and creating readiness for all the probable consequences.
• UYA members will put more emphasis on the relation with climate and ecological crisis in choosing their research questions.  

We will devote a major part of our available time and project budget for the coming years to these actions until we are convinced adequate institutional resources are allocated to this topic. We also advocate with other scholarly groups and academic institutions to declare a climate crisis and act upon it.

We will share all our actions openly and explicitly and we will communicate about the process, the difficulties we face and our achievements