The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit is a non-profit organisation that supports informed debate on energy and climate change issues in the UK.
Climate change presents important challenges and opportunities to Britons in the decades ahead, while the choices we make on energy have implications for society, the economy and the climate system. We believe that debates on these issues should be underpinned by evidence, and involve the full range of stakeholders.
We support journalists, parliamentarians and other communicators with accurate and accessible briefings on key issues, and work with individuals and organisations that have interesting stories to tell, helping them connect to the national conversation.
In 2022:
We successfully recruited for a young early-career minority ethnic intern in early summer last year and engaged her on several substantive projects contributing to our programmes of work; one of her pieces of briefing is on our website and was quite heavily used for briefing purposes ahead of, and during, COP27. As an organisation, we undertook some introductory training looking at individual and structural bias in the context of the duties and requirements of the Equality Act. From that, we then began working with a consultant to review our recruitment processes, in real-time, as we began hiring for two new roles. That is ongoing, and has involved a mix of practical advice and help, and additional training specific to how we go about recruiting new staff from a more diverse range of backgrounds. As we have worked through our planning processes this year, we have begun a review of the people we work with as senior associates and on our advisory board, seeking to broaden the diversity of both; that work continues. Whilst we have nominated a member of staff to be a champion for diversity and inclusion, we have yet to do that at board level, and we are still in the process of working through how we learn from the work we’ve been doing already to build equality, diversity and inclusion more routinely into all of our planning, risk and PDR processes. But the process has already initiated a discussion about framing a set of organisation values and purpose, which will be an important step in building EDI into our reporting, planning, and how we present our commitment publicly for those who seek to work with us or for us over the coming year. And finally, we have yet formally to share more of what we have been working on with partner organisations, but we have been making connections, seeking and sharing advice, where others are working on similar.
In 2023:
• We will continue to revise and change our recruitment processes, embedding learning from live recruitment processes into new procedures and policies to help guide all future recruitment in the organisation.
• Continue our work with consultants to help us to ensure that we are doing all we can to best retain, support and develop those we recruit, so that our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion does not stop at recruitment.
• Conclude the current review of our associates and advisory board to bring in new and more diverse voices to work with us as spokespeople and experts on specific projects, and to advise and guide our work from the advisory board. We seek to ensure that the board at least reflects the make up of society in terms of the Black, Asian and other minority ethnic members.
• Continue to seek and undertake training to help staff to: embed our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion; to work to remove structural bias; to build diversity and inclusion into our communications; and to make it core to our planning, risk, funding and performance appraisal processes.
• Nominate a member of our board to champion and lead on diversity and inclusion.
• Communicate this commitment and work to other organisations in our sector with whom we work particularly closely, with a view to encouraging others to sign up to this initiative, and work with us on elements of these commitments.
• Offer another paid internship this summer, particularly welcoming candidates from groups under-represented in our sector: those from a Black, Asian or other minority ethnic background; those from a socially or economically disadvantaged background; and those with a disability.