The pivotal roles of the scientists in the initiative lead by the French government to train all civil servants on climate, biodiversity and natural resources issues

As anticipated by scientists for decades, impacts of climate change, biodiversity losses and natural resources scarcity, are increasingly challenging human societies in these early 2020s. To respond to this challenge, a large number of countries are undertaking profound societal shifts towards low-carbon and biodiversity-friendly lifestyles. So far, these efforts have been clearly insufficient to achieve sustainable development goals and more ambitious action will be needed at all decision levels.

In France, the government has taken the decisive step to train all civil servants on the three above-cited environmental issues. The aim of this unique and ambitious initiative is to engage as many state stakeholders and practioners as possible, by raising their awareness and knowledge about both environmental risks and challenges to be faced, in order to initiate an effective, societal-scale transition that has to be collective, collaborative and systemic by essence. This initiative is partly related to a "foot in the door" media operation carried out in June 2022, just after the presidential and legislative elections, and initiated by the scientific community to offer free training courses on climate and biodiversity issues to newly-elected members of parliament.

The ongoing inter-ministerial initiative is steered at national level by an interdisciplinary group of scientists who are responsible for framing training content and methods. Its operational implementation is ensured by regional committees of scientists to address local issues grounded in actionable reality, and to facilitate effective scaling-up. The ambition is to train 25,000 top managers civil servants by the end of 2024, and 5,7 million civil servants by 2027. Scientific knowledge is at the heart of the training program and the entire cursus runs over 28 hours in face-to-face to ensure cooperative dynamics during workshops, masterclasses, debates and field trips. More than 1,200 academics have volunteered to disseminate scientific facts as aid to decision-making, and to present the scientific methods that supports them. Training courses in scientific mediation will be offered to scientists engaged in the project, especially to early career researchers. The evaluation of the full initiative will be independently carried out through 3 PhD theses.

The ultimate aim of this initiative is to create shared and long-lasting spaces for dialogue and trust between public decision-makers and the scientific community. In this talk, we will describe and discuss the pivotal role played by the scientific community in this initiative. We will report the lessons learnt from the first training courses, as well as the successes and various obstacles that have been encountered.