From Critique to Audit: A Pragmatic Response to the Climate Emergency from the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a Call to Action

Rethinking the work of academics in a time of pressing deadlines for climate action, this paper offers a series of new pragmatic strategies that academics can take up. It suggests a "climate pledge" where university teachers promise 5% or more of their teaching time to link the field of their traditional research to climate issues. It suggests that humanists, social scientists and data scientists need not only to "critique" the logic of extraction that propels our climate catastrophe, but also to "audit" individual institutions, writers, and politicians for their continuing engagement with climate or lack thereof.