On the 5th and 6th of November, OTTERS joined the Plastic Pirates Summit hosted in Brussels. Franziska Stressmann (ECSA) and Laura Gavrilut (21c) represented the OTTERS team with the workshop titled “How to upscale, maintain, and coordinate Citizen Science in the Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters’ objectives?”.
Before the workshop, sister Mission Ocean projects and relevant stakeholders were asked to answer a short survey to share their best practices in marine and freshwater citizen science and send the resources they have developed that can help promote them. These included guidelines, factsheets, white papers, data collections and/or management methods, guidebooks, training and online courses, recorded webinars, etc. The OTTERS team has gathered the collected material, categorised it, and will make it available on the Citizen Science Resource Hub.
Eighteen participants joined the workshop, with a majority of citizen science practitioners being policy-makers, teachers, and funders. OTTERS introduced the scaling concept and its types for citizen science projects and mainly focused on scaling up the efforts of the project.
The participants were split into 3 focus groups to discuss the challenges they faced while running their citizen science projects and what experiences they gained in these projects. After the individual group sessions, the rapporteurs of each group presented the primary outcomes.
Amongst the most common challenges encountered by the participants in implementing citizen science projects were the degradation of the ecosystem, pollution from factories and agricultural sewage, litter on the beach, flooding, and eutrophication.
Key messages of the workshop
The question at the heart of the workshop was how to scale up aquatic citizen science initiatives to fulfil the Mission Ocean Objectives in a way that fosters meaningful, long-term engagement and transformative change?
It was unanimously agreed that awareness-raising campaigns should not only target citizens and communities at the forefront but also speak to public authorities, to expand the impact of the campaigns. At its core, participants agreed that the most effective citizen science campaigns gather more data, but more importantly, to truly address the challenges faced by communities, they also need to inspire a shift in participants’ relationship with their environment.
These initiatives cultivate lasting connections between people and nature by empowering individuals with a sense of responsibility and stewardship for their local waterways. Participants agreed that an EU-level platform would greatly facilitate the creation of successful campaigns that would include clear and step-by-step guidance on how to run such scaling campaigns.
Participants also raised that scaling up does not just mean increasing geographic reach or participant numbers. True success lies in deeply engaging communities, enabling them to co-create solutions tailored to their specific environmental challenges.
When communities are empowered to take the lead in crafting solutions, the result is not only more sustainable in the long-term but also more impactful. Therefore, scaling up or out is not always the best possible goal, but scaling down and scaling deep can also be options for projects to achieve actual change.
The workshop also highlighted that schools are vital hubs for fostering community connections. As centers of learning and local activity, schools can act as bridges between citizens and local authorities, facilitating communication and collaboration, as well as engaging the next generation of citizens.
Practical suggestions on how to ensure the sustainability of campaigns and projects included long-term funding mechanisms, integrating results from closed projects into new initiatives, keeping websites up-to-date after projects end, decreasing bureaucracy in funding applications and result submission, and building strong communities with self-drive that bring local challenges to the attention of policy-makers and local authorities.
We are grateful for the enthusiastic participation and the passion participants showed in co-creating solutions throughout the workshop, and we hope to engage again soon.
The workshop report, all the resources gathered via the survey, and the co-creation campaign toolkits can soon be found on the OTTERS Citizen Science Resource Hub.
