Citizen Science, Civics, and Resilient Communities: Engaging Informal Science Learners in Participatory Science and Deliberation about Building Resilience to Weather and Climate Hazards

Because climate hazards present a range of potential impacts and considerations for different kinds of stakeholders, community responses to increase resilience are best considered through the inclusion of diverse, informed perspectives, local knowledge, and complementary methods of engagement. The NOAA-funded Citizen Science, Civics, and Resilient Communities (CSCRC) project aims to sustain engagement and increase environmental literacy among community participants, contribute citizen-created data, local knowledge and community values to local resilience planning efforts, increase capacity among Informal Science Education (ISE) institutions for convening and leading participatory activities to engage citizens in resilience planning and data collection, and develop a theory of action to inform future resilience planning activities. The project team includes partners from the Museum of Science (MOS), Arizona State University (ASU), SciStarter, Northeastern University (NEU), the National Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net), ISeeChange, Portland State University, NOAA, and educators from science centers around the nation working with local and national resilience planning partners and subject matter experts.

Diverse groups of participants at 28 US science centers will learn about vulnerabilities and resilience strategies through visualizations of geospatial data, consider and share values and perspectives with regard to proposed resilience strategies and their societal economic, and environmental tradeoffs, formulate resilience plans to increase their communities' resilience to four natural hazards (heat waves, sea level rise, extreme precipitation, and drought), develop skills and help to inform questions for investigation through citizen science, collect and analyze environmental and social data, and present their findings to resilience planners, scientist partners, and diverse publics. Each of the informal science education sites will work closely with resilience planners to select an appropriate resilience hazard and citizen science projects that correspond to local resilience planning priorities.

We have developed a theoretical framework called “science-to-civics” to accomplish these objectives and prototyped it during the summer and fall of 2019 in the Boston region to address the topic of extreme heat. We began by developing hands-on informal science education activities, attending and convening community meetings, and working with local and national media partners to describe and demonstrate the urban heat island effect and its effects on public health and infrastructure and invited members of the public to participate in subsequent citizen science and public engagement activities to help build community resilience. We then engaged over 50 citizen scientists in urban heat island mapping in the cities of Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, collecting data along routes designed in collaboration with community members, civic planners and national subject matter experts. A community forum event called "Wicked Hot Boston" to be convened September of 2019 during National Climate Preparedness Week will share outcomes from the heat mapping, visualizations of the ISeeChange observations, and then convene deliberative discussions to engage approximately 100 participants in participatory resilience planning about mitigation strategies for extreme heat events such as the ones observed by the citizen scientists. Forum participants will deliberate about the tradeoffs of potential strategies such as vegetative urban landscapes, enhancing engineered infrastructure to protect them from heat vulnerabilities, and increasing preparedness and public accessibility to cool areas during extreme heat events, and make recommendations about a community using visualizations and facilitated discussion. A panel of urban planners from the communities of Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline will share their local resilience planning activities and corresponding decision-making priorities, and public participants will be able to ask questions and recommend priorities for building local resilience.

After the pilot extreme heat materials have been tested in this first pilot phase, we will revise them in response to our formative evaluation findings. We will then create and implement science-to-civics modules for the other project hazards (extreme precipitation, sea level rise, and drought), testing them at 8 science centers in the project’s second year. The project will expand to 20 additional science centers around the nation in the project’s culminating third year, collecting summative evaluation data that will contribute to a theory of action about combining citizen science and community engagement to help build community resilience.