Austria Center Vienna, 1, …
From Citizens to Science: Tools Driving Climate Action
On April 28, 2025, during the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna, the H2020 I-CHANGE project will hold its final scientific event titled “From Citizens to Science: Tools Driving Climate Action” Over the past four year, I-CHANGE has worked to place citizens at the core of climate action, demonstrating that informed, empowered communities are essential for achieving behavioural change. By combining active citizen participation, innovative technologies, and scientific collaboration, the project has fostered behavioural transformations towards more sustainable living. This closing event will present the outcomes of I-CHANGE, showcasing results from its eight Living Labs across Europe and beyond. These Living Labs served as active hubs for environmental monitoring, and community engagement, emphasizing how citizens can observe and reduce their own environmental impacts. The event will feature the presentation of the project’s final results, including scientific findings, technological and engaging activities that have been implemented to raise climate change awareness and foster participatory science. It will also include talks from sister projects involved in citizen science initiatives related to climate change, and offer reflections on how citizen-generated data can complement scientific observations and help shape a more sustainable future. In addition, on May 1, 2025, key I-CHANGE results will be featured during the EGU session titled “Engaging Citizens in Understanding Urban Climate and Climate Change Risks through Participatory Science.” This session invites contributions that explore citizen participation, crowdsourced data collection, and effective practices for integrating the public into climate adaptation efforts across Europe. For more information, please visit here
ECS Policy Event “Citizen Science beyond 2030: Societal Engagement for a Sustainable Future”
Join the ECS project at the online policy event "Citizen Science beyond 2030: Societal Engagement for a Sustainable Future” taking place on Wednesday, 22 January 2025, 10:00-12:00 CET. By contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - be it through providing monitoring data, raising awareness or promoting behavioural change - the citizen science community has demonstrated that it can play an important role in supporting sustainability transitions. During this online event, a panel of experts and decision-makers from science and policy will take stock of the progress made so far, identify challenges and barriers, and discuss how citizen science can best advance sustainable development in Europe both within and beyond the SDG framework.
ACCTING Panel Towards a fair and inclusive Green Deal: Insights from European research
The European Green Deal sets out ambitious goals to achieve a fair and green transition without leaving anyone behind. However, emerging research indicates that existing policies and practices largely fail to incorporate gender and other complex inequalities. Hosting presentations focused on the policy areas of disaster management, mobility, and food security, the panel’s presenters illustrate – through comparative case studies – what changes in behaviours of individuals in different positions of intersectional vulnerability are underway, and what changes are hindered. In doing so, the presentations highlight various factors that enable and hinder individual behavioural changes and changes in social practices within and across policy areas, such as access to certain kinds of material resources and social bonds, ideology and values, and reliance on technological and political solutions. The insights give further valuable insights on the effects which the politically envisioned green transformation has and will further have on various kinds of marginalised and vulnerable communities. On this backdrop, the panel further discusses to what extent digitalisation can complement and contribute to achieving a just and socially inclusive green transition.
The SOCIO-BEE journey comes to and end and we want to share with you all the experiences learned together with our findings and results. Three years of work to develop a technology that empowers citizens by monitoring the air around them while assembling communities of informed citizens to change their behavioural habits and influence mobility planning in towns and cities with evidence. We want to share with you the technological development we have carried out during this time, as well as the countless engagement strategies we have deployed to facilitate these communities (our ‘hives’), to favour an effective change in their way of understanding and dealing with air pollution. We will also share, as a final reflection, the lessons learned during these 36 months of work and recommendations for working with citizen science methodologies to foster the assembly of these communities. If you work or have worked on similar projects, are interested in air monitoring or plan to work with communities using citizen science methodologies to bring about behavioural change, join us and participate in this event.
Citizen Science has the power to deliver major change in the way the EU Green Deal objectives are delivered. If we can get just 15% of the population of Europe engaged to tackle behavioural change issues through citizen science nearly 70 million people would be driving change on issues such as air quality, climate change and sustainable lifestyles. Come and learn about the cutting-edge research that is seeking to make this possible. The event will have a speaker from the UNEP as well as presentations from 7 Green Deal Call projects on their work across the EU: AURORA, I-CHANGE, SOCIO-BEE, COMPAIR, ECF4CLIM, GreenSCENT and PSLifestyle. The event will be of particular interest to policy makers, researchers and others interested in finding out more from forefront of climate change research and innovation.