A Dutch family doctor called Tibor Poelmann posted a petition on an online forum for GPs in 2021. He wanted their pension fund to stop investing in oil and gas. It quickly gathered 1,200 signatures.
Three years later the fund, which looks after €10 billion (£8.4 billion) for 25,000 doctors, decided to sell all its fossil fuel investments. The push came from the doctors themselves, through a council of GPs elected by the fund’s members.
Our new paper in the journal Frontiers in Education was inspired by cases like this. Research on who can act on climate change tends to sort the world into governments, markets and campaigners. Professionals fall between those groups. We treat them as a class of climate changemaker with their own means of influence.
Nearly everyone agrees something has to be done, yet on current policies the world is still heading for nearly 3°C of warming. Responsibility is scattered across governments, businesses and individuals, each able to point to someone else who should act first. Psychologists call this diffusion of responsibility. In everyday life, that sounds like “that’s not my job”.
A doctor’s focus is health, a lawyer’s is the rule of law, an engineer’s is structures that stand up and a teacher’s is the children in front of them. Climate change now threatens each of those. Doctors owe duties to patients, and lawyers to clients. Climate change has begun to harm those people, so acting on climate change as part of doing the job well.
Professionals also influence the institutions and decisions that shape how society responds. Doctors decide what gets prescribed and sit on the bodies that write clinical guidance. Lawyers advise the companies whose projects need permission. Engineers build to standards their own institution sets.
Each works inside an institution that needs to change and belongs to a profession that can rewrite its own rules. Health professionals also rank among the most trusted messengers on climate, whatever the listener’s politics. Governments still have to act, and professions are among the things that drive political change. It was doctors who turned smoking from a habit into a health problem, then the laws followed.
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Yet professional authority can stall action too. Training instils standards and ethics, so that a patient or client can rely on the result, but those same standards and routines can make established ways of working difficult to challenge.
Without a push, professionals keep running the systems that cause the harm, competently and by the book. Healthcare has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter since 2016. Top American law schools send graduates into the oil and gas industry at well above the national rate. One student campaign calls this the fossil fuel lawyer pipeline. Teacher training, if it covers climate at all, teaches the science of a warming planet and says little about its social and economic causes.
Three stages
How can a profession begin to change? Our paper identifies three stages at which climate responsibility can become part of professional practice.
First, the profession needs to recognise climate change in its own terms. In medicine that has happened, with more than 200 medical journals jointly calling climate change the greatest threat to global public health. In law it is happening through pledges like Lawyers Are Responsible, whose signatories refuse work that undermines the 1.5°C warming limit agreed by the UN. Teachers can see how climate change undermines children’s learning, as hot classrooms sap concentration plus storms and wildfires close schools.
Second, recognition turns into duty, because it won’t automatically trigger action. The clearest case so far is in law. The Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, now tells them they have a duty to warn clients about climate risk, and advice that ignores climate looks less and less like competent advice.
Third, the duty is written into the rules and institutions a profession controls, from its codes of conduct and accreditation standards to its pension fund. This is where individual concern can become collective professional practice. That is what the Dutch GPs’ elected council did when it made divestment the fund’s policy. In Canada, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons is writing planetary health, the idea that human health depends on the planet’s health, into the framework that defines a competent Canadian doctor.
Where professions get stuck
Most professions have stalled before the third stage. Medicine has called climate change its greatest threat for years. Yet a student-run audit of 188 health schools in 21 countries, the Planetary Health Report Card, still finds many teaching little about it. Most bar associations have yet to say whether helping to expand fossil fuel production raises any ethical question.
The same questions extend beyond medicine, law and education. Engineers, accountants, planners, social workers and police officers all work under their own codes, regulators and training requirements. Climate change threatens what each profession is there to protect. A few have started to write it into their rules.
Canada’s government has set a target that by 2027, 70% of its engineers, planners, accountants and landscape architects should be able to help clients adapt to climate change. Adapting means preparing for the heat, floods and wildfires that are already here, whatever happens to emissions. Professions Advancing Adaptation Competencies is writing those skills into each profession’s standards.
If you belong to a professional body, ask it three questions. Does its code of conduct mention climate change? Does the training you need to stay qualified cover it? Where is your pension invested? If the answers are no, no and don’t know, our paper sets out how your profession could change them.
Aaron Thierry received studentship funding from ESRC.
Mario Veen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.