Each scenario includes a brief description of the challenge for citizen science, an example citizen science initiative and the opportunities and risks involved. 

You can use this as a reference to use in your activities, such as:

• holding a roundtable/seminar to explore the opportunities and risks for these alternative futures
• running a backcasting workshop to explore the steps required to reach a particular desired future (see more below about getting involved)
• using them as inspiration for designing new citizen science projects.

The increased negative impact of urban extreme heat - in particular indoor extreme heat - is pushing more and more cities to the point of crisis. Lowering heat stress in urban environments is crucial to protect the lives of vulnerable people – not only to ensure climate resilience for the future but to improve quality of life for European citizens.

In the Netherlands, a university research centre for gerontology is leading a national citizen science project to gather large-scale data on indoor extreme heat. Funded by the municipality, the initiative is sponsored by a technology company that provides low-cost indoor sensors, and collaborates with international partners (public health and housing bodies) experienced in running similar projects on data interoperability. 

The initiative engages young people in installing and collecting data in elderly residents’ homes, developing their research skills, and debunking misinformation which builds trust in institutions. It also enables an intergenerational approach to citizen science, strengthening wellbeing among local communities. As a result, the data produced is free to use and published in fair (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) ways for other municipalities to identify and implement risk mitigation strategies for communities that are most at risk of extreme indoor heat.

By understanding how exactly heat patterns will evolve, urban planners could redesign cities to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Citizen science can support this by gathering climate data and spatial heat patterns at the city-scale, supporting action through planning and individual or household behaviour change. 

Institutions have control over the granular level of data that is made public and how this data is visualised. Therefore, community groups may struggle to gain traction on the issues that matter to them, and due to their resources, their data cannot compare to institutionalised citizen science in terms of capturing large-scale data, maintaining data quality and aggregating data from smaller projects to be used in conjunction with larger datasets. As a result, bottom-up and small-scale citizen science could disappear – reducing the diversity of the broader citizen science ecosystem. 

• What kind of funding infrastructures could support the benefits described, without eliminating bottom-up citizen science?
• How can we ensure the continued maintenance and iterative development of key supportive infrastructure, such as data-gathering tools and platforms, data analysis and visualisation tools, data hosting and archiving, and domain-specific research infrastructures? 

Scenario inspired by:

Intergenerational housing: The Case of Humanitas Netherlands

Schools’ Air quality Monitoring for Health and Education (SAMHE)