EnviroCitizen: Article on citizen science and environmental citizenship published in Conservation Biology
EU-Citizen.Science
Oct. 22, 2020, 11:09 a.m.
Picture: Developing environmental citizenship through watching birds. Image by Jacek Matysiak.
In April 2020, the EnviroCitizen project launched, with support from the Horizon 2020 SwafS program. This project argues that citizen science has the potential to do more than create good science; it can create engaged citizens.
Birding activities, in particular bird counting and bird ringing, have some of the longest citizen science traditions in the world. We are examining bird counting and ringing activities - historically, today, and in the future - developing interventions and educational programs to increase citizen involvement and connect bird-specific activities to larger environmental issues. Such activities hold great potential for developing environmental citizenship, which can be defined as the rights, responsibilities, and relationships that individuals and collective society have toward nature.
Two of the EnviroCitizen teams recently published an article in Conservation Biology outlining the main proposition behind the project: the social capacity potential of citizen science extends far beyond collecting data.
Authors Finn Arne Jørgensen (professor of environmental history at University of Stavanger, Norway) and Dolly Jørgensen (professor of history at University of Stavanger) suggest that involvement in citizen science activities can cultivate environmental citizenship and change attitudes if projects are intentionally designed to do so. Here, we extend the ECSA Ten Principles of Citizen Science, which identify possible benefits to citizen scientists as publications, learning, enjoyment, satisfaction, and policy influence, to include development of environmental citizenship.
Environmental citizenship emerges as a citizenship class of world citizens who act differently for the sake of the environment. We argue that individuals through citizen science activities can generate and consume scientific knowledge about the environment, actively shape their own practices, and produce politically-relevant environmental action.
We propose three strategies to address environmental citizenship during the citizen science project design process: recognizing the collective nature of citizenship (collectiveness), cultivating situated citizenship (situatedness), and connecting local data to larger environmental problems (connectedness). We suggest that conservation biologists change the context in which existing citizen scientific data collection happens in order to build more aware environmental citizens.
To read the article, visit https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.13649. The final version of the article will be available as Open Access.
For more updates, you can visit EnviroCitizen’s website or follow EnviroCitizen on Twitter.
EnviroCitizen has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 872557.