Scientists are boycotting the COP28 to demand action at home

Scientist Rebellion: The role of scientific activists in climate change advocacy and a climate change case study in Denmark, in the wake of COVID-19

Becoming an activist hasn’t come naturally for many of the researchers demonstrating during COP28. “I’ve been trained to see science and politics as separate,” says Aaron Thierry, an ecologist-turned-social-scientist at Cardiff University, UK, who now studies activism among scientists. But “we’re seeing increasingly that scientists are becoming much more comfortable being activists”.

After blocking the train, 15 protesters were arrested and released shortly after being charged, according to Marthe Wens, a drought-risk scientist at Free University in Amsterdam.

The Members of Scientist Rebellion will be staging adie in in front of the Danish parliament building over the next few days in protest of the lack of action by politicians at theclimate summit. They will be demanding that private jets be banned in the country.

Dablander and his colleagues conducted a survey of about 9,200 academics. The researchers found that 51% of scientists agreed or strongly agreed that other scientists should engage more in advocacy — and 36.7% said that they should engage more in legal protests1. The results have not yet been peer reviewed, since they were posted on the preprint server.

In a survey of 1,200 people in Switzerland, it was found that 25% of participants were more concerned about the environment than before, because of the Fridays for the Future protests spearheaded by Swedish environmental activist Ginny Thunberg. “It shows that there were some quite important impacts in terms of awareness, and at least the attempt of changing behaviours,” says study co-author Livia Fritz, a social scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark.

According to sources that spoke to Nature, scientists can have a positive effect on the public because of their expertise. According to a survey published last month by the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington DC, the percentage of people in the United States who have a large or fair amount of trust in scientists fell by 14 points after the COVID-19 pandemic began, to 73%.

To effectively respond to climate change, researchers must have deep public engagement, and those roles need to be created.

Early Communication During the California Fires of 16 August 2020: A Crucial Tool for Scientists and Public Communautators in the 21st Century

In the early morning of 16 August 2020 there were the first lightening strikes, and e-mails and phone calls. Over the span of 3 days, more than a thousand lightning strikes sparked hundreds of fires in California. In the days and weeks that followed, California was besieged by an unprecedented sequence of events. The largest fires in modern state history triggered mass evacuations from walls of flame. Near-apocalyptic smoke pollution rendered the skies above San Francisco a dystopian orange — and caused thousands more deaths than expected for the time of year.

That month, I put my research and other responsibilities on hold to engage fully with the crisis. I spoke to more than 100 media outlets in a relatively short period of time, and I walked a social-media audience of millions through the disaster. Once the short-term emergency had passed, I briefed decision makers at local to national levels on the causes and context of the crisis, and its long-term implications.

More such roles are urgently needed. This year has seen record-breaking heat and extreme-rainfall events globally, and that’s just a preview of what is likely to come. I usually take calls all day long and give media interviews straight through the night, because there is simply no one else who is available. I estimate that I spend more than 1,100 hours each year, the equivalent of more than 6 months of 8-hour working days, on public-facing communication.

I’ve been very fortunate to find support, but maintaining it requires continuous justification to institutions and funders, and involves cobbling together disparate funding sources. I don’t know if there will be funding to keep me alive beyond the next six months. The struggle has been encountered by many scientist-communicators.