Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre: Modern Slavery and Climate Change

Funding available for research into modern slavery and climate change.

The Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (Modern Slavery PEC) has issued a funding call for research on modern slavery and climate change.

The aim of this call is to generate new evidence on how policies on climate change can recognise, address and impact on modern slavery risks or linkages between modern slavery and climate change.

While international aspects, such as laws, policies or supply chains, might be examined, applications to this call must generate recommendations for UK based policymakers and decision- makers, such as businesses.

All projects must meet objective A, and then must meet either objective B or C.

A: Develop evidence-based recommendations for policymakers and other decision-makers (such as businesses) about how policies on climate change can recognise, address and impact on modern slavery risks or linkages between modern slavery and climate change.

And either

B: Generate evidence to influence the Environmental Social Governance (ESG) policies and strategies of businesses and investors.

• Projects aiming to address this objective must work with one or a group of businesses or investors to co-develop and pilot a framework to track ESG policies and strategies to better connect environmental issues and impacts along with modern slavery risks, and how to address this combination of factors effectively. This should take account of existing obligations on large UK businesses under section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
• Projects could include the generation (or testing, modifying existing) of standards, metrics, and/or performance indicators to enhance understanding and reporting on ESG strategies, which can more effectively connect environmental issues and impacts with modern slavery risks and offer recommendations on how to address these.
• Projects may choose to adopt a sector-specific approach. In this case they should explain how the selection of sector/s was made, and include in the proposal a justification for this with reference to previous research and in terms of potential for the research to make a contribution.

Or

C: Generate novel evidence on how modern slavery can be integrated into UK Government and devolved administration climate change policies (‘mainstreaming’).

Projects should consider policies such as net-zero, overseas aid funding for climate change programmes or policies around public procurement of goods and services in new industries and innovations that shape efforts to address climate change (e.g. renewable energy). Projects should consider how such climate change policies can reduce and respond to modern slavery risks.