The contributions of citizen science to SDG monitoring and reporting on marine plastics

Abstract

The accumulation of plastic litter in marine environments is a major environmental challenge along with the difficulties in their measurement because of the massive size of the oceans and vast circulation of plastic litter, which is being addressed as part of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Citizen science, public participation in scientific research and knowledge production, represents a potential source of data for SDG monitoring and reporting of marine plastic litter, yet there has been no evidence of its use to date. Here, we show how Ghana has become the first country to integrate existing citizen science data on marine plastic litter in their official monitoring and reporting of SDG indicator 14.1.1b for the years 2016–2020, which has also helped to bridge local data collection efforts with global monitoring processes and policy agendas by leveraging the SDG framework. The results have been used in Ghana’s 2022 Voluntary National Review of the SDGs, and reported on the UN SDG Global Database, as well as helping to inform relevant policies in Ghana. In addition, here, we present a pathway that can be adopted by the relevant government authorities in other countries that have an interest in following a similar citizen science data validation and reporting process for this indicator and potentially others.

Multi-disciplinary Perspectives on Citizen Science—Synthesizing Five Paradigms of Citizen Involvement

“…Four panelists discussed a range of practices including open data and citizen science. 4 One panelist described an initiative where citizen science beach litter data have been integrated into the official statistics of Ghana, enabling the tracking of the related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicator on plastic debris density (Fraisl et al 2023). According to the panelist, these data are useful for both research and policy makers, illustrating that citizen science can simultaneously foster both scientific and societal impact.…”

“…EteRNA relies on both broadcast search and community production to generate novel RNA designs but also needs many participants to invest significant time to come up with solutions (crowd volume paradigm). Finally, the marine litter project in Ghana (Fraisl et al 2023) relies on many participants to collect beach litter and data from various locations (crowd volume paradigm) but also benefits from the fact that user participants have a deep understanding of the local context, allowing them to categorize litter more accurately considering the local production and use (e.g., the same type of litter may contain plastic in one context but not another) (user crowd paradigm) (Fraisl et al 2023).…”