Centering Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) in integrated data

All work that relies on Ecosystem services and data must prioritize DEIJ, with a clear and explicit focus on diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion. This means that we aim to address systemic inequalities and injustices in a direct, straightforward, and unambiguous manner, without any room for misinterpretation.

To center our efforts in DEIJ, we seek to understand the ways in which institutional, societal, and interpersonal factors have negatively impacted historically marginalized communities, and how we can work to address these issues in a way that promotes equity and inclusion.

To ensure that our work is informed by a DEIJ lens, we prioritize the following:

• We explicitly seek to understand how systemic oppression, marginalization, and other forms of inequality have influenced the outcome(s) of our research.
• We involve a diverse and representative group of stakeholders in all stages of study planning and execution, including analytic questions, data use, interpretation, and impact, to ensure that our work reflects a broad range of perspectives and experiences.
• We explicitly seek to support and empower populations who have historically been marginalized or excluded, and work to address the root causes of inequality in a way that promotes equity and inclusion.
• We report and analyze our results by relevant demographics (such as age, gender, SOGI, and location), and make every effort to fill in any gaps in our data to ensure that our work reflects the diversity of human experience.
• We acknowledge and seek to address the historical and ongoing harm caused by systemic oppression, including the role of state and non-state actors in perpetuating these harms.

Our responses to these issues include efforts to understand the historical and current role of oppression in our research, use data to quantify or understand inequitable outcomes and experiences, engage diverse and representative communities in study development, and address historical and ongoing harm through our data insights.

For a reference framework, please refer to resources including the Center for Urban Education's Equity Scorecard and the Leading for Equity Framework by National Equity Project