IEMA’s ‘Diverse Sustainability Initiative’ and LGBTQIA+ rights

IEMA's Digital Journalist, Tom Pashby discusses IEMA's creation of the Diverse Sustainability Initiative (DSI), following reports evidencing the lack of diversity within the profession and highlights the People of Colour and recent LGBTQIA+ networks.

The sustainability profession lacks diversity, according to a report published in 2017 by the think tank Policy Exchange. In response to the report, Sarah Mukherjee MBE, CEO of IEMA, decided it was time to create an entity dedicated to improving diversity and inclusion in the sector IEMA represents.

The Diverse Sustainability Initiative (DSI) was launched in March 2021 by IEMA and started to raise awareness about the lack of racial diversity in particular and encouraged organisations in the sector to share a public commitment explaining what they would do to improve the situation. DSI has since launched formal networks for people of colour and LGBTQIA+ people.

IEMA is the ‘backbone’ organisation for DSI, in that IEMA provides the core funding and staff for DSI, but people and organisations in the environment and sustainability sector wanting to improve diversity don’t have to have a formal relationship with IEMA.

The people of colour network has monthly informal meetings which provide a safe space within which barriers to progress can be discussed by its members. The network has quarterly formal meetings which are chaired by Sarah Mukherjee MBE.

In June 2023, which is Pride month in the UK, DSI’s LGBTQIA+ network recruited their two network leads and will follow a similar structure to the people of colour network.

Two leads were announced by DSI for the LGBTQIA+ network – Lucy Bradbury (she/her) and Meg Baker (she/her).

• Lucy is the global ESG (environmental, social and governance) training and development lead at environmental consultancy AECOM where she specialises in training teams to embed ESG into their operations. She has been involved with AECOM’s Pride Europe LGBTQIA+ steering committee and was on the national executive committee of Building Equality before she moved to the USA in 2022.

• Meg is co-director of inclusion and climate justice at Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK) and works with the University and College Union to support members on matters related to the ‘just transition’.

The DSI plans to create more networks for people from other marginalised communities in order to ensure that as much as possible is being done to create a more inclusive profession.

Find out more about the DSI here.