We are the voice of
CLIMATE JUSTICE
at the University of Toronto.
We are students from across the University of Toronto fighting to end the ties between the University of Toronto and the fossil fuel industry.
We are a grassroots movement seeking to dismantle the pillars of power upholding the fossil fuel industry. We do not live single issue lives and so are not a single issue group. We fight against white supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, and the other forms of systemic oppression creating the climate crisis.
200+
MEMBERS
5
FACULTIES
7
COLLEGES
CAMPAIGNS.
Climate justice issues our dynamic so our advocacy is constantly shifting to respond to pressing issues. We are open to new campaign ideas and welcome you to come pitch it to us. These are our current campaigns.
DIVESTMENT
U of T has been ignoring the alarm for decades. We will make them listen.
The University of Toronto and its federated colleges still invest over 100 million dollars in fossil fuels despite frontline communities sounding the alarm for decades.
In 2021, the University of Toronto announced after intense student action that it would divest from the fossil fuel industry by 2030. Likewise, following our 18-day occupation of Old Vic in April, 2023, Victoria College announced they would divest by 2030. St. Michael's and Trinity College followed them shortly after. This is too little, too late.
We will fight until we achieve full, just and timely divestment.
FOSSIL FREE RESEARCH
Big Oil has no place in climate research.
Between 2008 and 2018, the University of Toronto received over $64 million from the fossil fuel industry, funded 635 academic articles. Fossil fuel financing poses an inherent conflict of interest to the quality of the work and to the reputation of the entire university.
We are calling on the University of Toronto to institute a ban on accepting fossil fuel industry funding for climate change, environmental and energy policy research.
We recently completed our six month investifgation into U of T's ties to the fossil fuel industry. The full report can be found here.
BANKS OFF-CAMPUS
Banks are funding climate chaos. We want them gone.
Since 2016, Canada's largest banks have financed over $1.1 trillion in fossil fuel projects. RBC is the largest funder of fossil fuel expansion in the world. We are fighting to pressure these banks to stop funding climate chaos, and to tell them they are not welcome on campus until they take real action to stop funding fossil fuels
In March 2023 we held a sit-in at the RBC On Campus branch in the University of Toronto, and demanded that the University of Toronto Student Union sever ties with RBC due to its contributions to climate change. Our action was a success and the UTSU issued a statement condemning RBC. However, our work is not done - RBC is still involved on our campus.
JOIN US.
Fight with us for a fossil free future. We welcome professors, staff, and community member to support in other ways.
JOIN OUR MAILING LIST.
Join our mailing list to stay up to date on all our events, actions, and everything related to climate justice at the University of Toronto.
We would like to acknowledge this sacred land on which the University of Toronto and Victoria University operate. It has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island. With this acknowledgement comes an obligation center the voices of Indigenous communities and fight for Indigenous sovereignty, environmental and political knowledge, and land back within our advocacy.
We also acknowledge the University of Toronto’s history and place in colonization. The land that is now the University of Toronto was stolen from Indigenous communities to create the university. Everything since then has happened in continuity with this original land theft. Indigenous discrimination, disenfranchisement, and genocide are not a phenomena of the past. Indigenous communities continue to suffer from the usurping of land for extractivist and capitalist industries, including but not limited to fossil fuels extraction which the University of Toronto actively accepts donations from industries and partners with.
Without being actively decolonial, antiracist, and anti-oppressive in our work, climate justice is nothing more than an empty slogan.
Climate Justice UofT © Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
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