A Voice for citizens in environmental monitoring

Citizen science has a long tradition, the establishment of Citizen Observatories (COs) is recent. It is the big data, the fast developments in Information and Communication technology (ICT) that led in this evolution. The idea behind Citizen Observatories, is to use citizen-powered science in order to address key issues in environmental monitoring. European Union is strongly supporting this endeavor within the FP7 and H2020 programmes, aiming to overcome the obstacles and encourage citizen to be actively involved in environmental decision-making. The main issue to be tackled for the successful implementation of citizen science and citizen observatories is the readiness of policy makers in terms of awareness, acceptability and sustainability.

WeObserve , together with the CO projects LandSense, GroundTruth 2.0, Grow and Scent in collaboration with European Commission created this policy brief which addresses the issue, provides dedicated recommendations that highlight the need for citizen participation in environmental policy making. Furthermore, stress the fact that citizen science initiatives should be actively supported; outline the need to reduce the gap between bottom-up and top-down approaches and directly address the concerns of policy makers on citizen science.

The policy brief is available to read and download in the knowledge base, in the section Presentations-Papers. You can also download it  here.