The Equator Project

The Equator Project- Funded by a DLA Network

There is a well-documented racial diversity crisis in Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences subjects in the Global North, which leads to inequities in who does environmental research (see Bernard and Cooperdock, 2018; Dowey et al. 2021).

The Equator Project involves collaborators from academia, industry and professional bodies working together to deliver EDI interventions to improve racial equity in the environmental sciences. Equator is co-led by Dr. Natasha Dowey (Sheffield Hallam University, SHU) and Prof. Sam Giles (University of Birmingham, UoB), supported by a steering committee comprising postgraduate students, graduates, professionals, EDI specialists and academics.

The Equator project links three evidence-based interventions, to (1) improve access and participation, (2) improve experience and increase retention, and (3) remove barriers to access, for Black, Asian and minority ethnic students into postgraduate environmental research. Interventions include:

1. an annual ring-fenced residential research school that provides training, networking, and support to students, postgraduates and graduates with an interest in environmental research
2. an annual ring-fenced mentoring network where students from ethnic minority backgrounds with interest in NERC-aligned research are paired with one academic and one industry mentor for 6 months
3. the development of a network of best practice knowledge exchange with centres of NERC doctoral training

Through the novel multidisciplinary adoption of co-created Action Research in physical science, we evaluate and demonstrate the impact of these activities in a UK context, enabling us to develop strategic and evidenced insights translatable to other UK HE disciplines.

Equator began with a NERC EDI grant led from SHU by ND in 2022, continued in a second iteration led by SG at UoB in 2023-4, and ran a third iteration in Spring 2025 using British Geological Survey sponsorship. The project is now sustained for up to 5 years through funding from a consortia of Doctoral Landscape Award holding universities (funded by the Natural Environment Research Council), who have committed part of their NERC "Flexible Funding" to support Equator Project EEDI action research interventions. This work will be coordinated from SHU and led by ND and SG.

The Equator Project has produced tangible, positive and meaningful outputs (e.g. Fernando et al. 2023; Kada Research 2024; Dowey et al., 2024), and this new iteration of the project will continue and sustain these positive impacts on the environmental research community. 

Our confirmed sponsors moving forward include CREATES (Cambridge), CENTA (Birmingham, Loughborough, Warwick, Leicester, Cranfield,OU), IGNITE (Southampton), IAPETUS2 (Durham, Glasgow, Heriot Watt, Newcastle, St Andrews and Stirling), ACCE+ (Liverpool, Sheffield, York), YES-DTN (Leeds, York),  CROCUS (Reading, Swansea) and E5 (Edinburgh). The committed funds will fund the Equator Research School and the Equator Mentoring Network annually.