Our World – Our Goals 2.0: Updated Recommendations on Strengthening Citizen Science for the SDGs

Policy Recommendations

1. Increase Trust in and Legitimacy of Citizen-Generated Data

• Strengthen awareness and advocacy: Launch coordinated campaigns that showcase successful uses of CS in SDG monitoring and provide shared resources, messaging, and visibility, while enabling individual countries to adapt materials to their specific contexts. Target audiences should include policymakers, researchers or experts informing policymaking, and NSOs, as well as citizen science practitioners and researchers.

• Establish trusted and transparent data sources: Support and fund transparent, quality-assured repositories for citizen-generated data which are aligned with FAIR principles and safeguard data integrity through appropriate security measures, promoting the re-use of existing good practices and infrastructures. Encourage CS projects to, where appropriate, adhere to FAIR and CARE standards and publicly document their methodologies, limitations, and uncertainties, supported by dedicated guidelines and training.

• Develop quality assurance and data validation frameworks: Promote knowledge-sharing to compile and consolidate existing quality assurance protocols and data validation frameworks. Where necessary, close gaps through co-design, involving statisticians, CS practitioners, and third-party experts familiar with both strategic-level data quality demands and the working environment of citizen scientists on the ground to ensure that the results reflect the needs and priorities of both data producers and data users.

2. Enhance Usability and Uptake of Citizen-Generated Data

• Create institutional workflows and standardized methodologies: Facilitate the integration of citizen-generated data into official SDG reporting and other policy-relevant statistics by establishing clearly defined institutional pathways and workflows, and by disseminating standardized methodologies and toolkits for the CS-based monitoring of high-priority SDG indicators.

• Align CS research activities with policymaking needs: Provide support and guidance for CS initiatives to design and implement their research activities with policymaking in mind, for instance by disseminating overviews of policy-relevant data gaps and information about relevant knowledge brokers (e.g. advisory bodies), data repositories, metadata standards etc.

• Promote user-friendly visualization and translation tools: To improve accessibility for non-technical audiences (including policymakers), fund the creation of easy-to-use tools, such as dashboards that visualize data and allow policymakers to download filtered subsets, as well as the development of plain-language summaries, ideally produced by CS practitioners who can provide accurate and context-sensitive translations, complemented where useful by automated tools.

3. Strengthen Capacity and Foster Collaboration

• Invest in training and infrastructure: Develop training and mentoring schemes on the SDGs, data management and policy engagement for CS practitioners across all academic fields and disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities (for instance in the form of MOOCs co-developed with the ECS Academy), support NGOs and local-level institutions in delivering community-based capacity development, and invest in technical infrastructure and expertise to ensure data quality and usability.

• Foster sustained dialogue and networks: Strengthen existing CS networks (such as the Citizen Science Global Partnership, ECS collaboration group and network of CS ambassadors) to facilitate collaboration, scaling, and peer-learning, include CS representatives in international and national SDG monitoring forums, and develop platforms (e.g. annual stakeholder cafés) for regular dialogue between NSOs, policymakers and CS projects to help align their priorities and close current gaps in coordination.

• Engage youth and early career researchers: Advance the integration of CS and the SDGs into school and university curricula to raise awareness and increase the visibility and legitimacy of CS for sustainability, positioning youth as drivers of transformative change, strengthen existing networks at the interface of sustainability research and education, and support the reform of research assessment to incentivize researcher engagement in citizen science initiatives.

4. Mainstream Citizen Science through Policy, Funding, and Broad Engagement

• Update legal and policy frameworks: Advance legal reforms that mandate statistical agencies to consider CS as a data source for official reporting if quality criteria are met, and promote the embedding of CS in national-level open science, open data, sustainability, and digital governance strategies.

• Provide dedicated and long-term funding: Foster the creation of dedicated funding mechanisms for CS projects contributing to the SDGs and sustainability more generally, e.g. in the context of national and regional green transition funds, including accessible funding modules for local, small-scale, and grassroots CS projects; encourage member states to support cross-border consortia by offering matched funding and shared infrastructure grants to cover the costs of facilities or platforms used collaboratively across borders; develop longer-term funding mechanisms (including funding for umbrella organizations like ECSA) to help improve coordination, consolidate partnerships, facilitate capacity-building, and increase impact.

• Widen participation in research and agenda-setting: Ensure local communities and underrepresented or hard-to-reach groups affected by the issues under investigation and/or holding unique knowledge about them  are meaningfully involved not only in SDG-related citizen science, but also in the drafting of new sustainability frameworks, respecting Indigenous knowledge under CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority, Responsibility, Ethics) principles.

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