• Member Login
  • Contact
Menu
  • Member Login
  • Contact
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on email
Search
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on email
  • Member Login
  • Contact
Menu
  • Member Login
  • Contact
Search
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on email
Search
  • Home
  • News
    • News
    • The GYA Blog
    • GYA in the Media
    • COVID-19 Initiatives
  • Members
    • GYA Members
    • GYA Alumni
    • Recent Member Publications
    • Being a GYA Member
    • Call for New Members
    • Membership Map
    • Information for Alumni
  • Activities
    • Activties of the GYA
    • — Science & Society
    • — Research Environment
    • — Science Education & Outreach
    • — GYA & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
    • View all Activities
  • Events
    • Events
    • Annual General Meetings
  • Young Academies
    • National Young Academies
    • Establishing a Young Academy
    • Regional and global Young Academy meetings
    • Joint Young Academy Activities
  • Publications
    • Publications
    • Statements
    • GYA Podcast
    • Subscribe to the GYA Newsletter
    • Newsletter Archive
  • Resources
    • Resources
    • Opportunities
    • Science Advice Resource Centre
  • About
    • GYA in Brief
    • Constitution
    • Governance
    • Committees
    • Advisory Board
    • Host Academy
    • Partners
    • Team
    • Donate
    • Contact
Menu
  • Home
  • News
    • News
    • The GYA Blog
    • GYA in the Media
    • COVID-19 Initiatives
  • Members
    • GYA Members
    • GYA Alumni
    • Recent Member Publications
    • Being a GYA Member
    • Call for New Members
    • Membership Map
    • Information for Alumni
  • Activities
    • Activties of the GYA
    • — Science & Society
    • — Research Environment
    • — Science Education & Outreach
    • — GYA & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
    • View all Activities
  • Events
    • Events
    • Annual General Meetings
  • Young Academies
    • National Young Academies
    • Establishing a Young Academy
    • Regional and global Young Academy meetings
    • Joint Young Academy Activities
  • Publications
    • Publications
    • Statements
    • GYA Podcast
    • Subscribe to the GYA Newsletter
    • Newsletter Archive
  • Resources
    • Resources
    • Opportunities
    • Science Advice Resource Centre
  • About
    • GYA in Brief
    • Constitution
    • Governance
    • Committees
    • Advisory Board
    • Host Academy
    • Partners
    • Team
    • Donate
    • Contact
  • Home
  • News
    • News
    • The GYA Blog
    • GYA in the Media
    • COVID-19 Initiatives
  • Members
    • GYA Members
    • GYA Alumni
    • Recent Member Publications
    • Being a GYA Member
    • Call for New Members
    • Membership Map
    • Information for Alumni
  • Activities
    • Activties of the GYA
    • — Science & Society
    • — Research Environment
    • — Science Education & Outreach
    • — GYA & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
    • View all Activities
  • Events
    • Events
    • Annual General Meetings
  • Young Academies
    • National Young Academies
    • Establishing a Young Academy
    • Regional and global Young Academy meetings
    • Joint Young Academy Activities
  • Publications
    • Publications
    • Statements
    • GYA Podcast
    • Subscribe to the GYA Newsletter
    • Newsletter Archive
  • Resources
    • Resources
    • Opportunities
    • Science Advice Resource Centre
  • About
    • GYA in Brief
    • Constitution
    • Governance
    • Committees
    • Advisory Board
    • Host Academy
    • Partners
    • Team
    • Donate
    • Contact
Menu
  • Home
  • News
    • News
    • The GYA Blog
    • GYA in the Media
    • COVID-19 Initiatives
  • Members
    • GYA Members
    • GYA Alumni
    • Recent Member Publications
    • Being a GYA Member
    • Call for New Members
    • Membership Map
    • Information for Alumni
  • Activities
    • Activties of the GYA
    • — Science & Society
    • — Research Environment
    • — Science Education & Outreach
    • — GYA & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
    • View all Activities
  • Events
    • Events
    • Annual General Meetings
  • Young Academies
    • National Young Academies
    • Establishing a Young Academy
    • Regional and global Young Academy meetings
    • Joint Young Academy Activities
  • Publications
    • Publications
    • Statements
    • GYA Podcast
    • Subscribe to the GYA Newsletter
    • Newsletter Archive
  • Resources
    • Resources
    • Opportunities
    • Science Advice Resource Centre
  • About
    • GYA in Brief
    • Constitution
    • Governance
    • Committees
    • Advisory Board
    • Host Academy
    • Partners
    • Team
    • Donate
    • Contact

Citizen Science for Reducing Exposure to Urban Air Pollution (2019/20)

  • GYA Home
  • Activities
  • GYA & the SDGs
  • Citizen Science for Reducing Exposure to Urban Air Pollution (2019/20)
citizen science
Aims & Objectives
Contact
Manage (your) group membership
Find out more
Aims & Objectives

The 2019-20 GYA North-South Interdisciplinary Grant was awarded to Ibrahim Sidi Zakari (Niger), Robert Lepenies (Germany) and Lisa Herzog (Germany) for the research project: Citizen science for reducing exposure to urban air pollution.

The overall goal of this project is to investigate the potential of citizen science to advance air pollution-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Niger and Germany in a way that is at the same time concrete, ethically informed and collaborative, in order to be effective.

Contact

Contact Details

Ibrahim Sidi Zakari ()
Email:
Lisa Herzog ()
Email:
Robert Lepenies ()
Email:
Anna-Maria Gramatté ()
Email:

Partners & external contributors

N/A
Manage (your) group membership

This activity is not currently / no longer active. Thus becoming a member, or updating activity membership options is currently unavailable.

If you wish to re-awaken this activity please contact Anna-Maria from the GYA Office (find her contact details under Contact)

Update your membership options

If you are a GYA member or alumni but do not see a form to fill in here, please contact , so that the GYA Office can help you update your GYA login.

Find out more

External links for more information

We currently have no links to external websites to offer by this activity.

  • Forthcoming…

Progress

Clean air is an important policy goal around the world: in Europe, it is the most important environmental cause of premature death[1]. From 1990 to 2016, Niger registered the highest average annual population-weighted Particulate Matter PM2.5 (µg/m3) and higher number of deaths attributable to PM2.5 (µg/m3) than any other country of the African Union[2].
As part of Agenda 2030, the importance of clean air has been enshrined in Target 11.6 which aims “by 2030, [to] reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality […]” [3].

In order to effectively achieve this target, all countries will need to provide high-quality, timely and accessible data, often in areas where very little data exists today, complementing official data sources and statistics. Citizen science has been heralded as particularly promising here. It has also been lauded for its potential to make scientific engagement more widely accessible, and to help generate trust in science. However, it obviously cannot be applied in a one-size-fits-all approach, but needs to be adapted to different social and cultural contexts. This interdisciplinary project aims to start a pilot citizen science project for implementing the SDGs, which is:

  • Concrete: To have an impact, citizen science projects need to focus on improving a specific SDGs indicator. For air quality, this would be SDG 11.6.2[4]. This requires engagement with the precise methodological and institutional frame for how this indicator is measured and reported in the SDGs framework. Therefore, we want to both provide measurements and understand how this data can concretely feed into SDGs processes.
  • Ethically informed: Citizen science needs to pay attention to a number of ethical issues, including, prominently, data privacy. This is particularly important in context in which vulnerable (e.g. politically disenfranchised) groups are involved.
  • Collaborative: Most calls for involving citizens in science for the SDGs have been very general, or have focused on treating citizens as mere data-suppliers and their involvement as a mere technical issue. Yet in order to be long-lasting, solutions need to involve all stakeholders in collaborative arrangements where citizens have a voice and the space to reflect on their priorities. This is particularly true for Agenda 2030, which represents a global resolution to collectively engage in unprecedented social, economic and environmental transformation. How can citizen science projects be designed to make room for such reflection?

[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/air-pollution-still-too-high

[2] https://www.stateofglobalair.org/

[3] https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata?Text=&Goal=11&Target=11.6

[4] Annual mean levels of fine particulate matter (e.g. PM2.5 and PM10) in cities (population weighted)

Outcomes

In 2022, as an outcome of this project, an article on “Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment” was published in Minerva (DOI: 10.1007/s11024-022-09467-8).

In December 2019, Ibrahim Sidi Zakari was a visiting scholar at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Germany, where he collaborated with Robert Lepenies and Lisa Herzog as well as with local researchers in the field of environmental politics, statistical modeling and urban sociology. The team worked on the problem of air pollution, its impact on health, recruitment of volunteers for crowdsourcing activities as well as the optimal sample size. They also addressed practical and ethical questions related to data collection, validation, processing of data from citizen science initiatives and their management, and reached out to open source platforms. With the acquisition of 6 latest generation flow 2 type pollution sensors capable of measuring ultrafine particles, the team was able to do tests locally for short term model testing.

In a spin-off project, the grant work also led to the integration of crowdsourced data on cooking technologies and fuels into mobile and web apps (ENERGY TSAPP) for promoting clean cooking.

In addition to collaborative research, the team also focused on outreach: presenting on the topic at conferences and in papers, and connecting to organizations in Europea and Africa (for example,  World Wide Generation to explore possible collaboration on SDG reporting). Due to current pandemic travel and contact restrictions, planned workshops on citizen science in Niger and Germany were put on-hold. The group also linked to and attended meetings of the EU funded project https://www.weobserve.eu/about/.

Publications:

Lepenies, R.; Zakari, I.S. Citizen Science for Transformative Air Quality Policy in Germany and Niger. Sustainability 2021, 13, 3973. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13073973

 

See a full interim report here, and final report here.

Further Information

About the GYA North-South Interdisciplinary Grant

The GYA includes a diverse membership of scientists and scholars, in many disciplines, based in low/middle-income and high-income countries. This grant scheme was initiated in 2014, aiming to foster collaboration across the lines that often separate researchers and limit possibilities. Specifically, this scheme facilitates the development of small-scale, innovative, curiosity-driven, blue-sky, exploratory research pilots or prototypes that unite researchers in low/middle-income and high-income countries and cross disciplinary boundaries.
The North-South Interdisciplinary Grant is awarded annually, and is meant to provide seed money to enable GYA members to prepare a proof of concept, prototype, or pilot research project with a view to securing larger external funding.

    Summary
    Activity Status: Currently not active
    GYA Activity type: Sasha Kagansky Interdisciplinary Grant
    Established in N/A
    Leads & Contact
    Office Contact
    Anna-Maria Gramatté
    Active Members
    Ibrahim Sidi Zakari
    Lisa Herzog
    Robert Lepenies
    Followers

    There are currently no followers listed for this activity.

    Past Members

    There are currently no past members listed for this activity.

    Related News
    24 February 2021
    Improving air quality with citizen science
    10 May 2020
    Exploring citizen science to measure air quality
    23 August 2019
    GYA awards North-South Interdisciplinary Grant 2019/20
    Related Events
    No related events for this activity.
    Related Publications
    No related publication for this activity.

    Global Young Academy

    GYA Home
    News
    • News
    • The GYA Blog
    • GYA in the Media
    • COVID-19 Initiatives
    Members
    • Members
    • Alumni
    • Recent Member Publications
    • Being a GYA member
    • Call for Members
    • Membership Map
    • Information for Alumni
    Activities
    • Activities of the GYA
    • Science & Society
    • Research Environment
    • Science Education & Outreach
    • GYA & The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
    • View all Activities
    Events
    • Events Overview
    • Annual General Meetings
     
    Young Academies
    • National Young Academies
    • Establishing a Young Academy
    • Regional and global Young Academy meetings
    • Joint Young Academies Activities
    Publications
    • Publications
    • Statements
    • GYA Podcast
    • Subscribe to our Newsletter
    • Newsletter Archive
    Resources
    • Science Advice Resource Center
    • Opportunities
    About Us
    • GYA in Brief
    • Constitution
    • Governance
    • Committees
    • Advisory Board
    • Host Academy
    • Partners
    • Team
    • Donate
    • Contact
    • Member Login
    • Jobs & Calls for Bids
    • Legal notice
    • Privacy Policy

    The GYA in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter now.

    • Legal notice
    • Privacy Policy
    Menu
    • Legal notice
    • Privacy Policy
    Global Young Academy
    Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

    Strictly Necessary Cookies

    Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

    If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.