ALBATROSS has launched a toolkit to promote citizen science: The Citizen Science Toolkit. It aims to stimulate crowdsourcing through the participation of citizens in the different campaigns or initiatives promoted in the project. By embedding citizen science practices into ALBATROSS activities, the project can enhance data quality, community ownership, and trust in climate services, while supporting more resilient and inclusive adaptation pathways.
Citizen Science Toolkit
Citizen science plays a crucial role in the ALBATROSS project, enabling individuals, communities and non-experts to contribute to real-world problem solving by sharing their knowledge, observations, and measurements, such as identifying local adaptation priorities or improving climate services. This serves as a cornerstone for fostering community-driven climate adaptation strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa.
By involving citizens directly in the co-creation and co-evaluation of climate services and adaptation measures, ALBATROSS aims to enhance the relevance of adaptation planning and empower vulnerable communities facing the escalating risks of climate change. Further, this can serve to gather community perspectives on risks and priorities, which can ultimately ensure that the climate services and adaptation options developed are deeply contextualised.
The ALBATROSS Citizen Science Toolkit incorporates three core citizen science methods: crowdsourcing, where citizens submit observations or complete surveys; crowdsensing, which collects data provided by participants using environmental sensors (for instance, they provide indoor air temperatures, valuable data for understanding the impact of heatwaves on homes); and crowdmapping, to gather spatial observations provided by users.
To date, three crowdsourcing campaigns have been activated, one of them being completed, and the other two still ongoing:
- ALBATROSS multi-level policy analysis: This campaign was launched with the aim of performing a comprehensive mapping of African environmental policies, transboundary mechanisms and financial mechanisms in relation to the NBS nexus approach at the regional and (sub)national level. Participants were asked to provide policies, mechanisms, etc., and almost 300 inputs were received. The inputs collected are now available on the Policy Observatory. They were then used by UNESCO partners to carry out a comprehensive policy analysis.
- Indigenous and local knowledge: This campaign seeks to gather indigenous, traditional and local knowledge both by audio-recorded testimonies or by text regarding weather forecast, hazard forecast, seasonal climate prediction, indicators of weather change, etc, as well as regarding preparedness and adaptation measures.
- The role of nature-based solutions and sustainable livelihoods in mobility decisions: This campaign aims to collect and share anonymised factual stories (lived experiences) about people’s movement decisions (i.e. mobility decisions – involuntary or voluntary choices to move or stay or seasonal movements) and the influence of nature-based solution (NbS) projects/programmes or sustainable natural-resource-based livelihoods.
The ALBATROSS Citizen Science Toolkit demonstrates how inclusive, participatory approaches can meaningfully enhance the quality, relevance, and impact of climate services. Recognising the value of local knowledge and participation, the toolkit also serves to engage citizens, stakeholders and other groups in the project. The toolkit is planned to be available for project partners during the project, but also beyond the project.