Coordinator Perceptions When Assessing the Impact of Citizen Science towards Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Tracking progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires high-quality, timely, and accessible data, often in areas where data are rarely available. Problems exist due to socioeconomic variations between countries and the qualitative nature of certain indicators in their definition. Citizen science has the potential to contribute to several SDGs. However, whilst citizen science’s potential to contribute towards SDGs is well documented, limitations exist when measuring the impact that citizen science has made toward SDG progress. To better understand the issues and prospective solutions surrounding impact assessment towards SDG progress, this work presents the outcomes of semi-structured interviews with citizen science project coordinators. They reveal the complex nature of impact assessment within a citizen science context. Coordinators demonstrate greater confidence when the project is easier to relate to the SDGs, and the project methodology can objectively measure indicators. Issues exist, however, when considering SDGs with a broader, global context, those more difficult to link to project goals and when the project’s impact on them happens at timescales beyond the funding period. If the full potential of citizen-science contributions to the SDGs is to be realised, approaches are needed to fully consider practitioners’ needs and motivations.

Measuring the Outcomes of a Participatory Research Study: Findings from an Environmental Epidemiological Study in Kaunas City

“…The participatory action research found that an increase in scientific knowledge increases public awareness and contributes to scientific literacy [41]. Participation in citizen science could contribute to the SDGs by defining local targets, monitoring the progress, and having the potential to implement action [3,39,42,43]. The participants of this study became familiar with the study planning process, starting with the elucidation of environmental problems, the formulation of research questions and hypotheses, data gathering, and the principles of analysis.…”

How Networks of Citizen Observatories Can Increase the Quality and Quantity of Citizen-Science-Generated Data Used to Monitor SDG Indicators

“…A significant number of environmental citizen science initiatives and projects worldwide are "already contributing" or "could contribute" to one-third of the SDG indicators, e.g., by monitoring environmental quality (SDG 6, 13, 14 and 15), or health and wellbeing (SDG 3) [2]. Indeed, citizen science project coordinators show greater confidence in assessing the impacts of their projects by relating them to specific SDGs, or by attuning their methodology to the measurement of specific SDG indicators [8]. For example, the FreshWater Watch [9] project, run by Earthwatch, contributes to the specific SDG indicator 6.3.2 "Proportion of bodies of water with good ambient water quality", with citizen scientists involved in the project measuring key indicators of their local water bodies' quality and uploading the data collected to a global platform.…”

“…Community-validated observations (3) are integrated into different experts' portals (4), providing a higher level of validation(5). The expert validations provide feedback and can be grouped into different reference sets (6) that can be used as complementary high-quality training sets(7) to improve the classification capabilities of the AI-based automatic-validation tools (which in turn will provide better recommendations for future collaborative validations in each CO) generating high-quality data in global repositories(8).…”

Effective Implementation of Urban Agendas through Urban Action Structures (UAS): The Case of the Basque Country

“…The SDGs have received criticisms due to the difficulties involved in quantification, monitoring and implementation [9,10]. Certain indicators are qualitative, while monitoring of other areas demands "requires high-quality, timely, and accessible data, often in areas where data are rarely available", among other issues, due to the socio-economic differences between countries [11] (p. 2).…”

“…Participation and inclusion have been shown to facilitate stakeholder ownership of applied sustainable development strategies [12]. In this context, several works make the case that "citizen science has the potential to contribute to several SDGs" although "limitations exist when measuring the impact that citizen science has made toward SDG progress" [11] (p. 2). Thus, research which proposes self-evaluation of European projects in relation to "citizen science" through the completion of a questionnaire to evaluate their contribution to the SDGs is of interest [15].…”