Coordinator Perceptions When Assessing the Impact of Citizen Science towards Sustainable Development Goals

James Sprinks,Mohammad Gharesifard,Hannah Joyce,Luigi Ceccaroni,Uta Wehn,Stephen Parkinson,Sasha Marie Woods

doi:10.3390/su13042377

James Sprinks, Mohammad Gharesifard + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13042377

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Abstract

Tracking progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires high-quality, timely, and accessible data, often in areas where data are rarely available. Problems exist due to socioeconomic variations between countries and the qualitative nature of certain indicators in their definition. Citizen science has the potential to contribute to several SDGs. However, whilst citizen science’s potential to contribute towards SDGs is well documented, limitations exist when measuring the impact that citizen science has made toward SDG progress. To better understand the issues and prospective solutions surrounding impact assessment towards SDG progress, this work presents the outcomes of semi-structured interviews with citizen science project coordinators. They reveal the complex nature of impact assessment within a citizen science context. Coordinators demonstrate greater confidence when the project is easier to relate to the SDGs, and the project methodology can objectively measure indicators. Issues exist, however, when considering SDGs with a broader, global context, those more difficult to link to project goals and when the project’s impact on them happens at timescales beyond the funding period. If the full potential of citizen-science contributions to the SDGs is to be realised, approaches are needed to fully consider practitioners’ needs and motivations.

Highlights

As part of the Rio+20 summit held in Brazil in 2012, the United Nations (UN) committed to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), designed to be a follow-up to the Millennium Development Goals that ended in 2015 [1]
MICS seeks to provide a citizen science impact assessment framework that is a flexible yet standardised methodology which individual citizen science projects can use, based on their unique resources, yet generate comparable results across projects [24]. As part of this process, this paper presents a first appraisal of the current state of play regarding citizen science, its impact, and the relationship with the SDG framework
The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the processes project coordinators go through to assess the impact of their citizen science project, any issues that exist, and how they relate to the SDG framework

Summary

Introduction

As part of the Rio+20 summit held in Brazil in 2012, the United Nations (UN) committed to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), designed to be a follow-up to the Millennium Development Goals that ended in 2015 [1]. A monitoring framework was created to track progress towards each SDG target, resulting in the current list of 231 SDG indicators [3]. Tracking progress towards SDGs requires high-quality, timely, and accessible data, often in areas where few data are currently available. In appreciation of this limitation, the UN framework separates the indicators into two tiers, depending on the existence of agreed methodologies and data availability [4]. Current baselines and indexes developed for the measurement of SDG progress rely on data from formal international and national bodies, resulting in limitations due to socioeconomic variations between countries and the qualitative nature of certain indicators in their definition [5]

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