Environmental Tech Talent & Workforce
We're building new pathways for the people and teams working across boundaries to deliver for our environment.
Decision makers and teams and at every level of government—and in nearly every sector—need the right technology, data, and skillsets to adapt to a changing planet. That means a workforce built to improve outcomes across our ecosystems and communities.
Did You Know?
8 in 10 federal environmental bureaus have less capacity today than at any time in the previous four decades—even as the complexity of their missions has exploded. National priorities as wide-ranging as drinking water, wildfires, climate adaptation, and new infrastructure all require capabilities that legacy workforce systems and policy were never designed to provide.
Old models in tech talent and workforce planning won’t get the job done. Despite real advances in data-driven decision-making, civic tech, and digital service delivery, governments are still struggling to define, hire, deploy, and retain the talent they need to deliver on their missions. Now’s the time to design new strategies for building the teams and career pathways our environment and communities need.
The supply of tech talent isn’t the problem—major gaps are on the demand side of the equation. Whatever the root causes, demand signals for tech skills and talent inside government are neither clear nor consistent—especially when it comes to environmental or natural resource teams. Agencies need a clear roadmap, dedicated resources, and a shared vocabulary to bolster their technical workforce.
What Drives Us
Environmental work is becoming more complex, more technical, and more urgent than ever—but our workforce systems, career pathways, and delivery approaches haven't kept pace. EPIC’s theory of change is simple: the enabling conditions for better environmental and public health outcomes starts with getting the right people, processes, and human-centered tools in place. That’s why our tech talent and workforce initiatives are laser-focused on empowering government and its partners to use data and technology better, faster, and at scale. In practice, we advise and partner with leaders, policymakers, and teams working in or “around” government, and prototype new strategies and tools to build tech capacity wherever we can.
Why It Matters
At every level of government, environmental agencies and their partners face an unprecedented workforce crisis: climate impacts, the pace of technology change, and long-standing tech capacity gaps are all converging faster than our workforce systems can respond. Job descriptions and teams built for stability in a world that's anything but; workforce policy and talent approaches that screen for degrees and tenure rather than aligned skills or better outcomes; and training programs designed to replicate yesterday's models instead of adapting them to new conditions. The result is that leaders and practitioners across fields are struggling to help ecosystems and communities adapt.
Our Way Forward
EPIC’s tech talent and workforce initiatives cluster strategy, research, partnerships, and advocacy efforts in three priority areas:
1. Research + Strategy Design: We incubate workforce strategies, ideas, and partnerships that government leaders can use to enhance tech capacity.
2. De-risking Innovation: We build cross-sector partnerships to help leaders understand, experiment with, and invest in innovative approaches to tech talent and delivery.
3. Storytelling + Advocacy: We advocate for better models, policies, and approaches to enhancing tech and data use in government—so that teams can deliver better results across our ecosystems, communities, and environmental priorities.
Our Principles
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Modern environmental work requires integrated skillsets and purpose-built teams connected to distinguishable but evolving job families—what we call fieldcraft, datacraft, and statecraft. We design frameworks and talent strategies that bridge traditional ecological and scientific knowledge with blended technical and non-technical skillsets ranging from data science, engineering, and product management, to policy, environmental planning, community engagement, and design and user research.
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The major talent gaps we’re working to close aren’t on the supply-side of the labor market—especially when it comes to tech talent. People across disciplines want to do and improve this work. The bottlenecks we consistently see are government organizations that don't know what skills to hire for, HR systems that screen out—or fail to find and convert—good candidates, and teams without infrastructure to train, deploy, or retain talent effectively. That’s why our work emphasizes clarity on the demand-side; helping government to define skills needs, send clear signals to the labor market, and then build capacity to source and use that talent effectively.
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Just like innovative approaches to technology or data, workforce strategies must prepare teams to meet the evolving delivery challenges that live at the messy intersection of multiple goals. For us, that’s improving things like adaptive environmental management, public health, and community resilience. Our work centers those outcomes for people and ecosystems alike—including how decision-makers in and around government should navigate the trade-offs between technology and environmental impacts.
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Research, innovation initiatives, and the best-intended policy—absent good implementation—won’t drive better outcomes. That’s why we’re focused on building actionable strategies and tools—from workforce planning roadmaps, skills taxonomies, and policy recommendations, to hiring guides, and more—rooted in real-world feedback and human needs. Tech capacity in practice is just as much about people as it is about technology per se; including what or how they build, and the numerous policy, process, or data factors that shape their work.
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Workforce challenges span organizational boundaries, disciplines, technology environments, and many sectoral and policy contexts. No organization can do that work alone—and we don’t believe in panaceas or gate-keeping when it comes to work that can improve outcomes at speed or scale. That’s why EPIC works with federal agencies, state and local governments, Tribal nations, nonprofits, academic institutions, and industry partners to create approaches that enable the mobility of skills and ideas, meaningful knowledge sharing, and capacity-building designed to drive environmental progress.
Our Projects
Environmental Management Skills Taxonomy
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Our environments—and the technology we use to study and manage them—are changing. How we design, train, and deploy our workforce needs to change, too. That’s why we’re building a new kind of skills taxonomy—a baseline of where skillsets cluster, and where they might diverge, overlap, or need to evolve across the many policy, research, governance, training, and technology settings that interact with environmental work. Our aim is to help decision-makers in and outside government move beyond old models and boundaries toward the environmental workforce of the future.
Digital Service for the Planet (DSP)
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The Digital Service for the Planet (DSP) is a collaboration between New America’s Technology and Democracy programs, New Practice Lab, and EPIC’s Technology Program. Launched in late 2025, the DSP initiative is incubating innovative tools, data, policy ideas, and strategies governments can use to improve the delivery of services and outcomes across our ecosystems and communities.
Research, Advocacy, and Reform
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Despite more than a decade of advances in civic tech, digital service delivery, and public sector innovation work, agencies at every level still find it hard to hire or retain the workforce they need to deliver on their evolving missions. Building on recent research and advocacy in tech talent, state capacity, and public data infrastructure, we’re co-designing policy reforms and coalition efforts to build the kind of government all Americans deserve.
Permitting Technology + Talent
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Building on EPIC’s leading work in permitting innovation and reform, we’re partnering with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to reimagine how policy makers, project leaders, and agencies at every level can leverage tech talent to make environmental permitting faster and better for all involved.