Towards the European Green Deal. Improving awareness through citizen science campaign on extreme temperatures in the I-CHANGE Barcelona Living Lab on Extreme Events 

Abstract

There is a trend of increasing population in urban coastal municipalities in Mediterranean Regions. Particularly, Barcelona, with 160 inhabitants/ha in a surface of 10135,3 ha, can be considered as a Mediterranean coastal megacity. This huge urban growth in the recent years implies an increase in vulnerability against global warming and climate change. Recent reports had stressed that the annual average temperature of the Mediterranean coast is already 1.5ºC higher than in pre-industrial times. That widespread warming will continue during the 21st century, surpassing the global average by 20% annually and 50% in summer (MedECC 2020). On the other hand, temperatures can vary within cities, influenced by urban morphology, surface cover, materials, structure, and population activity (Aslam & Ahmad Rana, 2022). A better understanding of the effects of those parameters on the city temperature and its thermal comfort is a key to increase the resilience of the citizens against global warming. The I-CHANGE project seeks to raise awareness and promote changes of habits among citizens to mitigate and better adapt to climate change. It involves the citizens in science activities of collecting and understanding environmental data considering their physical, socioeconomic, and cultural context. The campaign presented here was designed by the Barcelona Living Lab on Extreme Events coordinated by the ICHANGE team of the University of Barcelona. It was scheduled for August 2023 and February 2024. Three citizen volunteers (coauthors in this paper) supervised by the UB team carried out this campaign in Barcelona and two coastal and touristic municipalities (Castelldefels, and Malgrat de Mar) located near the capital. The volunteers guided by the Barcelona Living Lab technicians worked to design two bicycle routes through their city that they would feel comfortable repeating several times. One route had to be along the coast and the other moving away from it. They used MeteoTrackers on a bicycle to collect temperature, pressure, and humidity data along the transects. Each route was covered on three different days during the summer, one time in the morning and another at night, resulting in a total of 12 transects in each municipality. The routes are expected to be repeated between January and February to collect winter data. The goal of the campaign is to encourage citizens to reflect on the temperature variation along the Mediterranean coast and the influence of urban characteristics, using urban classifications such as Local Climate Zones. The analysis will also focus on the differences between the three closely located coastal municipalities and the volunteers will have an active role in the data treatment and data visualization process. The I-CHANGE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 101037193.