The UK Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET) strives to be a scientific community founded on mutual respect, which celebrates the diversity of its members and their research. We commit to ensuring that COMET’s research and communal activities have inclusivity at their core, and that they promote equitable partnerships, create opportunities to enhance diversity, and provide accessible outputs.

EDI Oversight

In 2020, we established the COMET EDI Action Group, which ensures that COMET maintains its commitment to EDI activities and continuous improvement.

COMET EDI documents and links:

• COMET EDI Action Group Terms of Reference
• COMET Code of Conduct
• COMET Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Feedback Form
• COMET Complaints Procedure

Examples of COMET EDI Action Group Interventions:

1. Created the open access COMET Research Fieldwork Guidelines to provide tools for safe, inclusive and equitable research fieldwork practice across the environmental science community.
2. Established the COMET+ Webinar Series to use COMET’s platform to highlight the work of our international collaborators, as well as celebrate major annual events such as International Women’s Day.
3. Undertake annual diversity monitoring to review trends in the demographic of COMET and to design interventions for increasing diversity.
4. Introduced an annual summer internship scheme for undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to conduct research with COMET scientists.
5. Created an annual EDI/Outreach fund to support small projects.
6. Advocated for and removed problematic language from the jargon used in the remote-sensing literature.
7. Created a robust, GDPR-compliant complaints policy for reporting problematic behaviour, an anonymous reporting form for EDI-related matters and a Code of Conduct for meetings to establish expected behaviour.