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Citizen science is a rapidly emerging mode of research and innovation, and one which the projects funded under the Horizon 2020 Green Deal call are increasingly using to engage citizens in adapting to and tackling climate change. In this series of articles, we will be focusing on some of the key themes to emerge from the Green Deal Projects Support Office’s recent webinar on citizen science[1], such as citizen science’s role in realising the European Green Deal, the challenges presented by employing citizen science methods, and how we go about capturing the long-term impact and validation of results. In this final article of the series, we explore some of the ways impacts can be captured and some of challenges that emerge in doing so.
There is a body of knowledge being developed that describes the types of impacts of citizen science initiatives, including how to monitor and analyse these projects. But being able to capture and convey the impacts to both policymakers and the wider public is equally as important to discuss.
Citizen Science research delivers a wealth of outputs in the form of reports, policy briefs, and publications to disseminate knowledge and key findings. But it can be easy for the key impacts to get lost within the piles of paperwork that land on a policymakers' desk. It is also difficult to scale up the knowledge sharing to other stakeholders who can take on these practices in other regions and create a greater impact.
A significant element of reaching new people is how you frame your work and how you tell your story. Leveraging the art of storytelling is therefore an exceptional asset to citizen scientists in this regard and is especially useful in addressing the following challenges:
- Awareness and engagement of citizens
- Acceptability: Adding the value of citizen-driven science to decision and policy making
- Sustaining the ecosystem of support and scaling up.
In the Plastic Spotter project, in which volunteers studied the macroplastics found on the canals of Leiden in the Netherlands, pictures were used to not only showcase the nature of activities and the work that volunteers were involved with but were particularly useful in demonstrating the outcomes of the research. For example, the impact of COVID litter was illustrated through the picture of a small fish entrapped within a medical glove (Figure 1). This proved to be a very powerful image that had been picked up by news outlets including The Guardian and National Geographic.
Using a storytelling approach
Another technique, which was used in the We Observe project, was a storytelling approach. Figure 2 is a graphic of the template designed during the project as a guide of what to keep track of.
Step 1: How is the instrument being used? Will it be used during interviews or will it be used at the end for reflecting and using the grey literature to complete?
Step 2: Looking at the instrument itself and what its goals are: who is it for? Policymakers? Funding bodies?
Step 3: With that audience in mind, the narrative can be designed. Is it a policy brief? A poster? A video?
The greatest challenge that remains is measuring the impact in a quantifiable way, as impacts can manifest over long periods of time and in many different directions. Core aspects of the projects, including meaningful engagement, are difficult to measure, and it is often easy to use metrics purely because they are measurable, as opposed to the metric informing what the nature of the impact really is. An example that was discussed in the webinar was how an increase in Twitter followers is not reflective of engagement with projects or its reach; rather deeper metrics such as the number of retweets or click-throughs would be more appropriate. Yet, this still fails to capture the action taken. So, although measuring impacts is encouraged, a deeper interrogation into whether it is a false/vanity metric must be considered. You can watch the recording of our citizen science webinar and download the presentations on the Green Deal Projects Support Office website.
[1] [1] Acknowledgement: Thanks to our webinar speakers and participants, who provided the content for the basis of these articles: Alan Irwin, Professor at Copenhagen Business School; Gabriella Leo, Policy Officer, DG RTD Unit 4; Rosa Arias, Science for Change; Margaret Gold, Citizen Science Lab Leiden University; Alessandro Caforio, GreenSCENT project; Arlind Xhelili, PSLifestyle project; and Luis Narvarte, AURORA project.