Let’s talk about race: Diversity within the sustainability industry
How can the environmental industry work harder to become more representative of the communities we are working to serve?
A few years ago, I wrote an article on the homogeneity of the mainstream sustainability industry. From protests to panels, you don’t have to do much research to notice that environmentalism is very largely dominated by the white, middle-class. Since then, it appears the industry hasn’t made much progress with regards to diversity.
What’s the situation?
Recent research has revealed that just 4.8% of environment professionals identify as Black, Asian or minority ethnic, compared with a 12.6% average across all professions. For an industry that’s intentionally created to serve and represent every single person world-wide – this is bad. In fact, Some areas within the environmental sector, such as ‘conservation professionals’ are classified as being 100% white in their makeup, based on the latest Office for National Statistics data.
As accurately stated by Alison Robinson, Deputy Executive Chair, Natural Environment Research Council, “this lack of diversity means we are missing the chance for a wide range of people to contribute their talent and skills to furthering the excellence of environmental science and to helping us understand, predict, and tackle many of society’s most pressing challenges.”
What’s being done?
Several organizational and initiatives have been set up to tackle this issue of diversity and bring a wider variation of voices to the forefront such as; the Race for Nature Recovery, IEMA’s Diverse Sustainability Initiative, Wildlife and Countryside Link’s work with Full Colour. However, it seems that only incremental progress has been made on increasing the racial diversity across the sector.
The RACE report is aims to change this. Led by a diverse partnership comprising Nature Youth Connection and Education, Hindu Climate Action, South Asians for Sustainability and SOS-UK. The RACE Report seeks to replicate the success of Green 2.0, a seminal annual transparency report of staff diversity in the top 40 environmental not-for-profits and environmental foundations in the USA.
“this lack of diversity means we are missing the chance for a wide range of people to contribute their talent and skills to furthering the excellence of environmental science and to helping us understand, predict, and tackle many of society’s most pressing challenges.” - Alison Robinson, Deputy Executive Chair, Natural Environment Research Council
What makes this initiative different?
As seen by our work with the Climate Disclosure Report, Futerra stands behind the idea that organizational transparency is a crucial step towards change. This theory also rings true for the team behind The Race Report. Their objective is to get environmental, climate, nature and sustainability charitable organisations, and the trusts and foundations that fund them, collecting comparable data on racial diversity. Then publish the data for individual organisations so there is greater transparency on their progress to becoming more racially diverse and equitable organisations.
What’s the end goal?
Following this, the goal of The RACE Report is to collate and share good and best practice on race equity throughout the sector. And eventually, to mainstream understanding and acknowledgement of the barriers to inclusion that people of colour face within our sector and enable the sector to be in a position where it better represents the racially diverse communities that it serves.
These initiatives, and others like them, will work towards the shared goal of building a workforce that is more representative of modern Britain so that people of colour can thrive in this crucial sector.
Want to know how your organization can get involved? Find out more here