CitizenScience.Asia and the Global Citizen Science Partnership work towards becoming legal entities, and promote Citizen Science on the UN Stage
We’ve written before on efforts to form a Global partnership (or secretariat) for Citizen Science, and we are happy to announce this week marks the announcement of a formal entity to do this, hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna. The Global Citizen Science Partnership is a network-of-networks that aims to advance the use of citizen science to support the monitoring and implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). CitizenScience.Asia are pleased to be one of the Supporting Partners that have kick started what will be a crucial new focal point in the global Citizen Science space.
IIASA is an international non-governmental scientific institution in Laxenburg, near Vienna, that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Providing scientific guidance to policymakers by finding solutions to global problems through applied systems analysis in order to improve human well-being and protect the environment.
IIASA have worked with the global citizen science community to establish the Global Citizen Science Partnership (GCSP). Organizations that have been part of the process to date include Citizen Science Associations worldwide (including CitizenScience.Asia), academic institutions with expertise in the field of citizen science such as the University of Geneva and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, and a number of international organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Global Citizen Science Partnership is Go!
The GCSP is a network-of-networks that aims to promote and advance citizen science for sustainable development, while offering a coordinated point of entry for governments and business partners seeking to collaborate with the global citizen science community. It will also serve as a platform to promote and support networks that advance citizen science around the globe and offer strategic guidance and support to help establish new networks. Importantly, the organization aims to support the collection and exchange of open and findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data by formalizing a citizen science data standard, creating a data directory, and building an open data portal. This will be particularly valuable in terms of monitoring progress towards achieving the SDGs, as such an endeavor requires huge amounts of accurate, timely, and comprehensive data, which is often not readily available for many parts of the world.
“Tracking progress on the SDGs is a massive exercise in data collection and management, and strong global citizen science networks hold major potential to contribute data for this. Through citizen science, people around the world could become much more involved not only in monitoring the many indicators, but also in implementing the sustainable development agenda by contributing with their personal, everyday life choices,” notes IIASA Strategic Initiatives Program Director, Steffen Fritz.
The GCSP has already been involved in a number of global projects including running global initiatives on Citizen Science for the SDGs and the Citizen Science and Open Science Community of Practice. With the new Interim Board of the initiative, the GCSP is currently in the process of being registered as a legal entity. After a long time in processing CitizenScience.Asia has now been registered as a legal entity in Hong Kong, and this has enabled us to become one of the founding members of this new partnership.
“Citizen science has the potential to contribute to all 17 SDGs. IIASA research has shown that about 33% of the SDG indicators could be supported through citizen science initiatives. These findings have generated a lot of interest among policy- and decision makers responsible for developing and implementing the global indicator framework for the SDGs and targets. Through the GCSP, we will be able to provide tools, procedures, guidelines, and data for citizen science to facilitate effective engagement with the SDGs,” says Dilek Fraisl, a researcher with the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program.
IIASA hosts the partnership will lead this new GCSP secretariat. The partnership was introduced, and concrete examples of how citizen science data are already used for monitoring the SDGs presented during a session on Wednesday, 6 October at the UN World Data Forum, in Bern, Switzerland and online. IIASA Director General Albert van Jaarsveld spoke at the high-level plenary session of the forum on the vision of using citizen science data for the monitoring of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Global Citizen Science Partnership at the Asia-Pacific UN Science Policy Business Forum
Overlapping with the World Data Forum, other members of the GCSP (including CitizenScience.Asia) were also attending and participating in the Inaugural Asia-Pacific UN Science Policy Business Forum. This meeting hosted by the UN Environment Program was held conjunction with the convening of the 4th session of the Forum of Ministers and Environment Authorities of Asia-Pacific region, hosted by the Republic of Korea. CitizenScience.Asia and the nascent Global Citizen Science Partnership had attended these UN Science Policy Business Forums before, but this was the first time it was hosted on a more local scale by a UN Environment Programme Regional Office.
The opening session examined pathways for a sustainable, equitable and inclusive rebound from COVID-19 that is good for the people, the planet, and economies, Professor Graham Durant, Director of Questacon — the National Science and Technology Centre in Australia, representing the Citizen Science delegation by asking how do we engage citizens to participate and address these challenges. And providing examples like Mosquito Alert as citizen powered mechanisms to tackle further disease outbreaks. Prof Durant ending by saying a Decadal plan and APAC community of practice for Citizen Science were both needed.
There were then two afternoon tracks covering plastic pollution and zoonotic diseases and the impact of ecosystem degradation, both areas where Citizen Science can play an important role in addresses. In the “Towards Greater Transparency & Sustainable Investment: Turning the Tide on Ocean Plastic Pollution’ track, Heidi Tait, Founder of the Tangaroa Blue Foundation, presented on their citizen driven efforts to collect marine litter data to the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI). Their 150,000 volunteers contributed $16M in volunteer hours to fills data gaps for Australian SDG reporting. Heidi also presenting examples of how the government in Ghana had to rely on Citizen Science to gather their data for reporting on progress on UN SDG 14.1.1b on marine litter.
While this was the first regional UN Science Policy Business Forums, there are others planned for other regions, and with the Global Citizen Science Partnership now up and running watch this space for updates on participation and outcomes from other UN meetings covering Citizen Science.
Formalizing and expanding: Citizen Science at the UN was originally published in The CitizenScience.Asia Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
