Project description
Citizen science against pollution
Citizen science is increasingly popular in research, innovation and government. The EU-funded ACTION project makes it more participatory and inclusive, and supports volunteers to take leading roles in setting up new initiatives and using results as evidence for new policies. The ACTION accelerator - a research and innovation framework - provides help and resources to six-month citizen science pilots. Throughout 2020 and 2021 the accelerator hosts 16 pollution-focused pilots from seven countries. They are already making a difference, contributing to Sustainable Development Goals through the insights, processes, and communities they build. ACTION is also developing a citizen science toolkit to enable anyone to make their volunteer activities more participatory and sustainable, and inform future innovations in citizen science as a whole.
Objective
ACTION will transform the way we do citizen science (CS) today: from a mostly scientist-led process to a more participatory, inclusive, citizen-led one, which acknowledges the diversity of the CS landscape and of the challenges CS teams have to meet as their project evolves. We have partnered with 5 European CS initiatives tackling major forms of pollution, which pose substantial threats to human health and to the environment, and contributing to Sustainable Development Goals. These pilots will be the starting point for a ‘citizen science accelerator’, which will be expanded through an open call.
By considering the needs of multiple stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of CS, we will create methodologies, tools and guidelines to truly democratise the scientific process , allowing anyone to design and realise a CS project from the early stages of ideation to validating and publishing the results. Our research will account for the multitude of manifestations of CS, addressing everything from from small-scale, localised social issues to international research agendas. All ACTION’s outputs - infrastructure, the citizen science platform and toolkit - will be made openly available for online and offline use. They will use accessible formats and interfaces, which appeal to audiences with diverse motivations and backgrounds and provide detailed examples, workflows, and advice tailored for a range of activities, going beyond data collection and analysis. Our digital infrastructure will help citizen scientists use existing specialised platforms and publish results according to RRI principles, including open science. Our toolkit will tackle common difficulties around methodological choices, quality, incentives, community building and sustainability. In addition, the 35 pilots hosted by the accelerator will result in case studies that will demonstrate the impacts of CS at social, economic, environmental and policy level.
Fields of science
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
WC2R 2LS London
United Kingdom