Making Citizen Science results usable for environmental education and environmental policy decisions

The goal of the EU Horizon 2020 funded project COMPAIR is to bring together communities, researchers and policy makers to harness a city's greatest resource, its citizens, in the fight against one of today's greatest environmental challenges, air pollution.

Harnessing Citizen Science results for environmental education and policy-making

The project aims to make citizen science results personally useful to citizens and a valuable source of data for environmental policy decisions in urban settings. The project will not only provide innovative, advanced tools and standards to improve the quality of citizen science results and their use in local and urban decision-making mechanisms. It also sets out to foster better collaboration between citizen scientists, policy makers, and businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Starting in the cities of Athens, Berlin, Sofia, Plovdiv and the Flanders region, COMPAIR will empower people to design and conduct local air quality experiments. Easy-to-use stationary or mobile air sensors will help them to collect high-quality data that can be used by themselves and by city governments for research and policy-making. New technologies such as digital twins and virtual reality apps will make the data visible, understandable, and applicable to citizens on a personal level.

Co-creative workshops and Citizen Science support: inter 3 accompanies two Berlin pilots

inter 3 will lead the two pilot projects in Berlin, where citizens can use air quality and traffic counting sensors to measure air pollution. Part of inter 3's activities includes organizing three co-creative workshops to identify citizens' motivations, needs, and experiences related to air quality measurements. In a later phase, inter 3 will support the implementation of the CS-experiments.

As a result, locally adapted visualizations of the air quality results will be presented for each European pilot region, along with recommendations for action for individual behavior as well as for policy makers. The project will also work out how the Citizen Science results can be incorporated into existing statistics and complement and optimize environmental policy decision-making criteria. In addition, insights will be gained into the use of new technologies such as sensor technology, digital twins and virtual reality apps in citizen science research and with regard to the environmental policy empowerment of citizen science researchers.