Fossil Free Careers (logo)
Image of students standing on steps outside of a univeristy building and holding a Fossil Free Careers banner. The students are also holding red smoke flares.

AboutFossilFreeCareers

We are calling on UK University careers services to end recruitment pipelines into the oil, gas, and mining industries.

The vast majority of UK University careers services are actively promoting careers in the oil, gas, and mining industries. They invite these companies to attend careers fairs, advertise their vacancies on careers websites, and promote them in emails to the student body.

Universities are providing a recruitment pipeline into the extractive industries, and are propping up the companies most responsible for destroying the climate and the planet. But students across the UK are fighting backand campaigning to get their University careers services end their relationships with the oil, gas, and mining industries.

In 2022, we secured our first campaign win, and there are now 11 UK universities that have ended fossil fuel recruitment on campus. Join the campaign and let's make your uni the next!

The Campaign

Across the UK, students and staff are campaigning for an end to recruitment relationships between universities and the oil, gas, and mining industries. Increasingly, they are even taking things into their own hands and are chasing fossil fuel recruiters off campus themselves.

Campaigning under the banner of People & Planet's Fossil Free Careers campaign, these students are calling upon University careers services to do the following:

  • Refuse all new relationships with oil, gas and mining companies.
  • Decline to renew any current relationships with oil, gas and mining companies after the contractually obligated period ends.
  • Adopt a publicly available Ethical Careers Policy that explicitly excludes oil, gas and mining companies from recruitment opportunities.

By actively promoting careers in the oil, gas, and mining sectors, universities are reinforcing the power of those industries and contributing to the climate and ecological crisis. This practice must end. Over 60% of the university sector has now made a commitment to fossil fuel divestment, recognising that it is wrong to invest money in the very companies wrecking the planet. Yet every single one of those universities still has no policy to prevent oil, gas, and mining companies recruiting students on their campus.

It's now time to come together as students, staff, alumni, and community members to demand that universities take action and implement Fossil Free Careers.

Get involved!

Our Targets

Universities are currently propping up the very industries most responsible for the climate and ecological crisis unfolding around us: the oil, gas, and mining industries. By promoting careers in extractive companies, they are assisting these harmful, unsustainable industries to present themselves as an acceptable part of our present and future.

But we know that they cannot be part of a just and sustainable future for all. Fossil fuel companies are responsible for accelerating the climate crisis. They use their massive influence to prevent effective climate policy, and their entire business model is bound up in exploiting people, nature and the power differences caused by colonialism, capitalism and racism.

However, this also extends to the mining of minerals that are required for renewable energy systems, like cobalt and copper. Whether it is drilling for oil or mining for nickel, extractive operations depend on the exploitation of poor, marginalised, racialized populations who bear the brunt of the violence caused. Entire communities get displaced from their homes against their will, and have their land, water and air poisoned. Livelihoods are destroyed, and those who resist often experience violent repression.

We are therefore campaigning against the oil, gas and mining industry as a whole. Working with the London Mining Network Just Transition Working Group, we have developed a list of 250 target companies for this campaign.

Learn more about the campaign targets

Join the Movement!

Interested in hearing about how you can support the campaign for Fossil Free Careers at your university? Use the form to let us know where you're based and one of our staff team will get in touch!

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