Moving academia towards its safe and just space: reflections on activating scientists

Universities have immense potential to lead transformative climate action, yet they are largely failing to do so. We previously identified academic culture, with its focus on commercialisation, metrics, and competitiveness, as impediments to academic climate action. Building on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framework, we proposed an alternative vision, Doughnut Academia, which offers lessons for staying within human and planetary boundaries (Urai & Kelly, 2023) and issues a call to action that starts with culture change in scientific communities. In this essay, we reflect on the process of developing a participatory Doughnut Academia workshop, which aims to catalyze culture change and encourage people to find their own ways of engagement. Participants report that the workshop had multiple positive and enabling impacts on their research, teaching, institutional advocacy, activism and science communication. To encourage independent dissemination and wider engagement, we provide materials and advice for hosting the workshop. Finally, we reflect on the value of bottom-up approaches, such as our workshop, for bringing colleagues from all disciplines into dialogue about climate action.