COMPAIR supports citizens across Europe, including those with no science background, to use digital sensors to collect local climate data, focusing on air quality. Citizen science participants will be invited to analyse the data and use it to co-create new climate friendly behaviours and policies that address sustainability both at home and across the continent to improve the quality of the air for all.
Launched in November 2021 COMPAIR is working with local authorities and citizens to run citizen science experiments to supplement gaps in official air quality data to (a) co-create more effective social actions and (b) influence city policy. Together these actions will contribute towards healthier and greener cities for all. The citizen science initiatives are located in Athens, Berlin, Flanders, Sofia and Plovdiv. The COMPAIR community will share its results, data and methodologies so other groups from across the world can learn from our work and develop their own local air quality experiments.
Consisting of 15 organisations from 6 different European countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, United Kingdom, and The Netherlands, the initiative is led by Digital Vlaanderen.
ECSA activities and milestones
ECSA leads the Stakeholder Engagement & Framework design. Our aim is to engage different stakeholders in the pilots through a co-creation process, including the design of impactful communication and gamification approaches. ECSA will be leading the pilot operation plans where we will outline the key stages of the pilot deployment, drawing a road map and action plan. We will use this opportunity to apply ECSA’s experience in running successful citizen science initiatives and put in place a robust co-creative and inclusive methodology.
During the first 2 months of the project we have focussed on mapping stakeholders focusing not only on academia, industry and policy makers, but also on representation of society with all of its inherent diversity. Finally we have submitted an abstract to present a dilemma at the Living Knowledge Conference together with SOCIO-BEE. With this dilemma we will create a space for open discussion on different strategies of engaging vulnerable people to participate in citizen science projects. We will focus on barriers and avenues to overcome them.
Next steps
The next big step for this project is the first co-creative workshop with stakeholders for all the pilots. One of the workshops will be held in Berlin at the beginning of 2022 in Berlin, in which ECSA will participate actively. We are also contributing to a systematic map of citizen science projects whose tools can be useful for the project.
