Harnessing 'citizen science' to reinforce resilience to environmental disasters:creating an evidence base and community of practice

“公民科学”，即“非专家”参与收集或分析科学数据，在科学研究中发挥着越来越重要的作用。对于公民来说，这是一种极好的方式，有助于预测和警告影响他们的危险，对低收入和中等收入国家可能特别有帮助。在这些地区，公民科学还有可能产生对危险现象的共同理解，改善沟通，并帮助处于危险中的社区采取行动，提高他们在危险事件期间和之后的复原力。从以前与火山有关的研究项目中，我们有证据表明，与处于危险中的社区合作，收集数据并观察自然现象，确实有助于他们降低风险。它还通过帮助科学家和社区成员制定策略，将对生活和生计的影响降至最低，从而帮助他们应对围绕危险现象的不确定性。研究其他危险的研究人员也发现了这种情况。从关于公民科学的有用性的理论转移到使项目发挥作用的实践中，存在许多挑战。我们想要做的是(A)了解我们应该如何使用‘公民科学’来应对这些挑战并建立对环境危害的复原力(B)创建和培育一个国际跨学科实践社区，以便为未来的项目做出贡献(B)。我们将涉及解决以下目标：(1)从以前的公民科学计划和现有倡议中吸取教训并综合知识；(2)了解这些类型的项目成功的障碍是什么，并试图将它们分解。我们认为这意味着我们将不得不以新的方式拓宽我们对公民科学技术的思考。我们将吸收来自人文科学的方法和技术，并从国际发展的理论和最佳实践中吸取重要经验教训。我们将努力解决“自下而上”或社区驱动的做法与“自上而下”或技术官僚的数据收集方法之间的矛盾。我们还将通过以案例研究为基础的方法来实现这些目的和目标，以确定我们的想法，即这将如何最好地为面临环境危害风险的公民服务。公民是该项目的核心，因此我们将利用与三个不同研究地点(厄瓜多尔、讲英语的加勒比地区和尼泊尔)的社区的对话，为我们提供关于国家遇到的挑战的综合和批判性分析。为了实现这些目标，我们召集了所有相关领域的一组研究人员，并将利用我们的研究创建一个新的实践社区。每个研究人员都将成为他们专业领域的“冠军”，迅速召集一组专家参加最初的研讨会，我们将利用那里的讨论来综合相关倡议和现有证据。这种综合将被用来批判性地反思成功的障碍。在此期间，我们将解决以社区及其赋权和参与为重点的参与式发展方法与更传统的科学方法之间的紧张关系，这些方法是由科学家提供的知识和数据驱动的。我们还将努力了解叙事和叙事分析对“公民科学”计划的总体目标的贡献，以及它们如何有助于平衡项目中的关系。我们将对未来可能帮助项目成功地使用公民科学来增强社区应对自然灾害的能力进行分析。我们还将增加每个人对这一领域的知识。我们将与我们工作的社区分享这一分析，并设计了我们的案例研究，以供那些地区提高社区复原力的现有倡议使用。

'Citizen science', or the participation of 'non-specialists' in the gathering or analysis of scientific data, is playing an increasingly important role in scientific research. It is an excellent way for citizens to contribute to the forecasting and warning of hazards that impact them and could be particularly helpful in low and middle income countries. in these regions, citizen science also has the potential to generate shared understandings of hazardous phenomena, improve communication and help communities at risk take actions to improve their resilience during and after hazardous events. From earlier volcano-related research projects we have evidence that working with communities at risk to gather data and make observations of natural phenomena does help them reduce their risk. It also helps both scientists and community members cope with the uncertainty around hazardous phenomena by helping them to devise strategies that minimise impacts on lives and livelihoods. Researchers working on other hazards have also found this to be the case. There are many challenges in moving from the theory regarding the usefulness of citizen science to the practice of making a project work. What we want to do is (A) understand how we should use 'citizen science' to address these challenges and build resilience to environmental hazards (B) create and nurture an international transdisciplinary community of practice to contribute to future projects (B). We will involve addressing the following objectives: (1) learn lessons and synthesise knowledge from previous citizen science programs and existing initiatives;(2) understand what the barriers to success are with these types of project and try to break them down. We think this means we will have to widen our thinking about citizen science techniques, in new ways. We will incorporate methodologies and techniques from the humanities and we include important lessons from the theory and best practices in international development. We will try to address tensions between 'bottom-up' or community driven practices and 'top-down' or technocratic approaches to gathering data. We will also meet these aims and objectives by using a case study-based approach to frame our thinking about how this will work best for the citizens at risk from environmental hazards. Citizens are at the heart of this project and so we will use conversations with communities in three contrasting study sites (Ecuador, the English-speaking Caribbean and Nepal) to inform our synthesis and critical analysis of the challenges encountered in country.To achieve these aims we have brought together a group of researchers across all relevant fields, and will use our research to create a new community of practice. Each investigator will act as a 'champion' for their specialism to quickly draw together a grouping of experts to attend an initial workshop and we will use the discussion there to inform a synthesis of relevant initiatives and existing evidence. That synthesis will be used to critically reflect on the barriers to success. During this, we will address the tensions between participatory approaches to development focussed on the communities and their empowerment and engagement and more traditional scientific methods driven by the need for knowledge and data coming from the scientists. We will also work to understand the contribution that narratives and narrative analysis bring to the overall goals of 'citizen science' initiatives, and how they might help to equalise relationships within a project. We'll produce an analysis of what might help projects in the future successfully use citizen science to empower communities to deal with natural hazards. We will also increase everyone's knowledge of this field. We will share this analysis with the communities where we work and have designed our case studies to be used by initiatives already in place to increase community resilience in those regions.