Matías Acosta - Head of Exploration - UNDP AccLab Argentina - @DrMatiasAcosta

How can we collaboratively produce evidence for policymaking?

How can we build strategies to live in harmony with the environment?

In Co_Lab, we believe that citizen science can answer these questions while making social challenges visible. Moreover, such challenges might not have been addressed yet by the scientific system or the state. We also think that citizen science could also be used as a participatory approach that can help to shape the public policies needed for a sustainable recovery from the pandemic. From UNDP Argentina, and particularly Co_Lab, we are putting a lot of effort to contribute to the socio-economic recovery of our country. We believe that it is possible to develop “clean recovery strategies” that help to catalyze the development of our country in harmony with the environment. What could be a better strategy than working in collaboration to develop together public policies that help our recovery and coexistence with the environment?

We understand citizen science as a discipline that is centered around social issues, generation of knowledge, or data collection that takes place beyond the traditional scientific environment. Besides, a common characteristic of the discipline is that it happens with citizen or community participation. It generally follows a rigorous methodology developed and delivered entirely by citizens without formal scientific training or through their collaboration with scientists. Citizen science aims to advance the knowledge about social problems or at least to shed light on them, advance social interests, and/or promote citizen action or education. Hence, we found a clear analogy and opportunity to connect citizen science with public policies both in the current local context and in the longer-term looking towards more evidence-informed policymaking.

We are working these days based on these principles, and luckily, we are not alone. In the last years, there have been many citizen science projects in our country that aim to improve our knowledge and coexistence with the environment. Moreover, they can also help to establish the data required to formulate effective evidence-informed policies. There are a few examples that we would like to highlight. For instance, AppEAR has been used to understand aquatic ecosystems and cosecheros de granizos has been developed to advance the scientific understanding of severe storms. Moreover, some examples shed light on pollution problems such as ¿Qué pasa riachuelo? that has been used to monitor the contamination of the Cuenca Matanza and also Lab Ciudadano that has been used to investigate solid waste of households in the city of Buenos Aires.

The first experience of Co_Lab in citizen science is immersed in our current context. We want to better understand how the measures of physical isolation adopted to mitigate COVID-19 affect the air quality of the city of Buenos Aires. Hence, we began working in collaboration with citizens, open-seneca from the University of Cambridge, the National Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and the Government of the City of Buenos Aires to evaluate the air contamination using low-cost sensors in volunteers´ bikes (for more information, please visit this link). Furthermore, we are beginning discussions with scientists from the University of Cuyo, to expand this project to evaluate urban climate corridors and sound contamination too. There is still a lot that we need to learn to establish citizen science for informing environmental public policies, but we have already started the journey!

We are eager to work on other projects aligned with this topic in other regions of our country. We hope to count on and work collaboratively with scientists and citizens to better understand our coexistence with the environment. Besides, we hope that using this participatory approach we can increase the availability of data needed to develop more successful environmental public policies. If you are working on an environmental citizen science project, please do contact us!