CeNCOOS affirms the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion and is committed to routing out systemic racism and discrimination. CeNCOOS is a community. As a community, we have a responsibility to enhance and support the diversity of people, skills, and wisdom that make us stronger, make our work more relevant, and make our impact more inclusive and equitable. Promoting diversity within the broader CeNCOOS community is integral to achieving our mission. We recognize the legacies of institutional, systemic racism and oppression that persist within the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, including oceanography. We also recognize that systemic racism impacts the environmental health and resilience of Indigenous and Black communities, other communities of color, and underrepresented groups. We will strive to provide and co-create the information and tools our communities need to address environmental justice and enhance resilience. We renew our commitment to creating a safe and welcoming work environment where our many partners can work together, and to recognize and eliminate biases in our behavior and in our institutional policies and practices.
CeNCOOS endeavors to create, collect, and share information about our ocean, coasts, and estuaries with and for the diverse communities and stakeholders in our region. This information helps foster interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration, monitoring and management, and educational opportunities. We plan to continually assess CeNCOOS’s data and information sharing practices to identify and pursue opportunities to make each stage of the data creation and sharing process more accessible, relevant, and equitable. We will embed these values more deeply into our guiding principles and governance, and consider long-term objectives that contribute to achieving environmental justice. We look forward to engaging more deeply with the diverse communities of our region on these goals.