CCN, together with other organisations, launched a day of action on 7 November across US campuses.

“It's no longer just about climate… it's about the very right to be able to protest and organise for those issues in the first place,” she says.

But within CCN’s focus on antiauthoritarianism, the sector’s climate leadership is still a key area. Fossil Free Research is an ongoing campaign, and so are divestment efforts, although Colomer says the organisation has noticed that some students are moving away from divestment as some schools have not shifted yet.

A lot of organisations, she explains, are now pushing for a Green New Deal for campus, which can include measures that affect students more specifically than big-picture, symbolic ideas such as divestment.

These more practical measures include plant-based food options on campus, requiring students to take a course in climate change, or ensuring that new and existing buildings are energy efficient and use renewable energy.

Bridging gaps

Sustainable food is a new area of focus for student climate activists in the UK as well.

People & Planet, a UK student network organisation running campaigns for social and environmental justice, added a new criterion about food options to their 2024/25 University League in collaboration with Plant Based Universities.

The People & Planet University League has been running since 2007, comparing and ranking UK institutions on their performance on a number of criteria regarding sustainability, workers’ rights and migrant justice.

“[Sustainable food] is definitely something that students are demanding on their campuses,” Josie Mizen, Co Director: Climate Justice at People & Planet, says. “There are universities out there that are doing quite well in that area, but a lot that have not really thought about food as a particular aspect at all yet.”

People & Planet focuses on three ongoing campaigns, all chosen by the student network and operating in multi-year cycles. The Fossil Free and Fossil Free Careers campaigns aim to encourage universities to divest from fossil fuel industries and exclude them from university careers and recruitment activities.

Another campaign, Divest Borders, seeks to extend the logic of the fossil fuel divestment movement to the border industry, companies that profit from immigration detention, surveillance and deportation, Mizen says.

“Our main goal has really been about continuing to put pressure on universities to cut ties with these extractive industries,” she explains.

Like the US, the UK’s climate movement is also broadening its focus.

“We've noticed that students really care about furthering climate justice on their campuses, but also increasingly recognising the ways in which the climate movement intersects with other forms of injustice – that could be social, migrant, or economic. Students really want to work on these things in conjunction,” she explains.

A key goal of the organisation, she says, is to bridge the gap between two movements that historically have been separate.

“We see an important role for People & Planet as one where we can put forward why these movements need to coexist with each other and why you can't have climate justice without also having migrant justice and vice versa.”

Energy intensive

While there is an argument that AI tools can be leveraged to tackle climate change, their environmental impact is becoming evident.

Some groups are beginning to organise on the issue. For example, at the University of Michigan, a student group is raising awareness of the environmental impact of AI, while a CCN partner organisation is holding a meeting later this month, led by staff and scholars, to talk about the environmental, social, economic and political threats posed by AI. There have been student campaigns against data centres in the US, but Colomer says AI is not a priority at the moment, although the situation might change.

Mizen says that, as an organisation, AI is something People & Planet are worried about.

“Firstly, in terms of the resource use of AI, which is extremely energy intensive. But it is also funnelling money into companies that are fronted by billionaires and multimillionaires who are then using their influence and power to peddle climate denial, far-right and anti-immigration rhetoric,” she explains.

“We are extremely worried about it.”

While she says there is currently no network-wide campaign about AI, it may be something that students choose to work on in the future, although that’s hard to predict at the moment.

“AI could end up becoming embedded in our universities in ways that perpetuate injustice, but there could also be a much more organic resistance to it, as people realise the value of not engaging with it unless absolutely necessary,” Mizen explains.

“Potentially, as the harmful impacts of AI become clear, people might start to not use it.”

Standing with the students

According to People & Planet’s University League, not all UK institutions are performing in the same way when it comes to sustainability.

“What we're generally seeing is that sometimes newer universities, particularly those that became universities after 1992, are speeding ahead, whereas older universities… are quite often lagging behind and are not making changes at the same rate,” Mizen says.

Judging by the 2024/25 dataset – the 2025/26 University League is due to be published in December – Mizen says universities have a lot more work to do on ethical careers and recruitment.

Twelve universities have so far committed to the Fossil Free Careers campaign demands in policy since its launch, with more to be announced later this year, but ethical careers and recruitment is the area where universities score the lowest in the League – just 19 percent on average, compared to 75 percent on education for sustainable development, the best performing section.

However, there has been progress on the divestment front. Last year, 75 percent of UK universities were committing to divest from fossil fuel companies, and that number is now reaching 80 percent, explains Mizen, adding that this shows that the divestment argument has been won.

Crucially, those institutions not acting on divestment and sustainability goals risk their reputation, she says. “By continuing to platform these companies, they are undermining their own research and their own academics.

“They're also threatening their reputation among young people who don't want to associate with the fossil fuel industry and don't want to associate with institutions that prop up these industries.”

In the US, Colomer says that this is a pivotal moment to answer the question of where the sector stands.

“Universities are being confronted with these huge attacks from the Trump administration. And I think that's what makes this moment so key: are universities going to stand with students and thus with the climate, or are they going to go against that by appeasing to Trump's demands?”

She mentions the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, through which the US administration offered preferential access to federal funding to institutions complying with a set of demands, including capping international student numbers.

“Thanks in part to our efforts, we achieved seven of the nine institutions that were initially offered the Compact to say no to it, and to actually stand with their students and defend the right for academic freedom and climate innovation,” she says.

“That's an incredible step showing that universities are standing on the right side, but it's not quite enough, and that's why we're still pushing.”