The Institution of Environmental Sciences

• Participated again in the Science Council and Royal Academy of Engineering’s Professional Bodies Diversity and Inclusion Progression Framework to measure our own progress, and as part of this process have received feedback from external consultants.
• We have also embedded the process of publishing member diversity statistics in our annual report.
• We have progressed as planned through our EDI Plan 2023-2026 in the five key areas of governance, committees and employment, membership and registers, events and training, communications and publications, and education and accreditation. Progress is reviewed regularly by our Communities & Membership Engagement Officer, who is responsible for the Plan’s implementation, and progression goals are set annually to ensure adherence to the overall Plan.
• In our effort to commit to continuous monitoring and review of our recruitment processes and making further changes for improved inclusivity going forward, we have signed up as a Disability Confident Committed employer. This means positive action for disabled applicants is embedded in our recruitment practices.
• We have adapted our planned ED&I Action Community into a group of EDI Champions who will come from across our member Communities, promoting EDI principles within their own Community and convening throughout the year to discuss interdisciplinary EDI initiatives. We are currently recruiting Champions from Communities where they are not yet in place.
• We annually review best practice in the sector to ensure things like our application processes for membership/volunteer and paid roles are as inclusive as possible.
• As we launch our new website in the coming months, we will introduce online membership applications, as this is something our reviews have indicated in the past as an area in which we could improve accessibility.
• We are planning to engage with our Fellows in Q4 to gather their views on encouraging underrepresented groups to apply for Fellowship.
• We have developed our mentoring offering to expand the pool of mentors for incoming mentees, we achieved this through targeted mentoring drives to different groups of IES members to ensure we were encouraging a diverse pool of members to mentor. We updated our mentoring handbook to provide additional support on being a mentor and being mentored, opening up mentoring to a wider audience. Supported by the mentoring platform hosts, we are creating further support and guidance documents to offer tailored support to members from underrepresented groups.
• Our Events Lead has been working to improve the accessibility and inclusivity of our events, particularly considering how our in-person events can be more neuro-accessible. We have put mechanisms in place so that those interested in sharing work at our events can opt to do so through mediums other than live presentations (for example by pre-recording a presentation, or producing a poster or handout), and we also proactively communicate accessibility information about events/venues rather than expecting attendees to ask us for this.
• Promoting and elevating the work of members from underrepresented groups within our messaging and communications has been one of the commitments that has presented the biggest challenges. For example, it can be difficult to identify members from underrepresented groups to platform without making assumptions about their identity, as the diversity data we collect from members is optional, so we do not have access to information about all members’ characteristics. We will therefore by trialling a process where members can self-nominate their work to feature in our newsletter to try and address the issue of unintentional selection bias. We also encourage self-nomination to host our popular ‘Day in the Life’ webinars.
• The 2025 Student Ambassadors created a workplan for their activities this year, to align their work with the IES Strategy. Work this year included promoting the CEDHE EDI Guide to our member institutions to support with preparing students for professional practice and ensuring equality, diversity and inclusion was central to preparing students for the professional world. The Student Ambassador Scheme for 2026 is expanding further to allow students studying on masters programmes to apply for the scheme. Expanding the scheme should increase the applications from underrepresented groups and provide an opportunity for more students to get involved with the IES.
• We have been mindful of the recommendations identified in our publication ‘A challenging environment: Experiences of ethnic minority environmental professionals’, and are taking steps to help the sector address them. This includes engaging in partner initiatives and projects. We are also currently developing a new workstream aligned with the findings.

Our biggest piece of work supporting EDI more widely was our publication ‘A challenging environment: Experiences of ethnic minority environmental professionals’, which produced recommendations for the sector. We are piloting EDI training for staff in the hopes that we may be able to support members in this capacity longer-term, though this is still in its early stages. Finally, we are always happy to share our work to help other organisations develop. Earlier this year, we presented on our EDI Plan to the Science Council’s EDI Forum as they had identified it as a good example of how their self-assessment report feedback could be embedded into day-to-day work. We have maintained involvement in a wide range of sector EDI schemes. This includes the Wildlife and Countryside Link EDI Working Group; the RACE Report; the Science Council EDI Forum; the Business Disability Forum; and the Equator Project. Involvement in these groups and initiatives allows us to take a collaborative approach towards the systemic change we know is needed, and also helps us to support rather than duplicate work being done in the sector.

1. We will conduct a survey asking our members about their experiences around equity, diversity and inclusion in the environmental sciences, as well as their experiences as IES members. The survey is planned for the final quarter of 2025, with reporting on the results planned for the first quarter of 2026 alongside our annual membership demographic metrics.
2. As part of our Disability Confident Committed status, we will pilot the provision of work shadowing opportunities for disabled people interested in the environmental science sector. The timeline for doing so is yet to be confirmed however it will certainly take place in 2026.
3. We plan to offer a limited number of shadowing opportunities initially as the staff team becomes familiar with the scheme, and longer-term consider whether there is interest and capacity for us to scale this up to a more involved work experience scheme.
4. We will have produced a plan for improving the gender balance of our Fellows by the end of 2025, and implement it during 2026. This will be based on a discussion with existing Fellows scheduled for September to ensure we are developing initiatives that include input from those with first-hand knowledge of the process. Progress towards this goal will be measured by tracking how far we are able to move towards an even gender balance by the end of 2026.

• Annual tracking of our volunteer EDI data;
• Member gender, ethnicity and disability data published in annual report;
• Annual participation in the RACE Report;
• Science Council self-reporting framework (as often as decided by the Science Council, currently once every 3 years);
• Annual review against the Wildlife and Country Link Route Map.

All of the above are reported to senior management, to Council as appropriate, and where there is enough data to produce aggregated, anonymous reports they are shared publicly (e.g. annual report and RACE Report).