AURORA has joined the Citizen Science Global Partnership (CSGP) working group to develop the World Environment Situation Room (WESR) Citizen Science Portal. AURORA will explore how its data management strategy can support the development of data standards that will be used to ensure that all projects listed on the portal offer sound and reliable data sets that can be used in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) studies.
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What is the World Environment Situation Room (WESR)
The World Environment Situation Room is a platform to implement the UNEP Big Data Initiative. It fits with the Data for the Environmental Alliance (DEAL), a Member State Initiative that aims at empowering the delivery of the environmental dimension of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, by making big data and exponential technologies accessible and efficiently utilized by member states, society, and industry.
To quote UNEP “The World Environment Situation Room implements the Big Data Initiative. It targets country policy makers, top environmental policy makers, the environmental scientific community, business and interested citizens. The platform is essential a knowledge instrument to support progress on delivering the environmental dimension of Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development”.
AURORA is working with the Citizen Science Global Partnership (CSGP) and representatives from all the regional Citizen Science Association to further develop the citizen science portal on the WESR platform and link it to Regional Citizen Science Platforms. This portal will offer EU Funded Citizen Science Horizon 2020 projects a global site through which we can share our experiences of developing citizen science projects to mitigate (that is reduce and stabilise greenhouse gases) and adapt to climate change (that is reduce the risks from the harmful effects of climate change).
AURORA is about working with citizens in Europe to reduce their personal carbon emissions. The portal will give AURORA the opportunity to share our experience with a global audience. All the material we produce in the AURORA project including our approach to community energy and the AURORA app, a personal trainer for citizens to use and monitor the reduction in their personal carbon emissions, can be shared with a global audience through the WESR citizen science portal and the developing CSGP website offer all the Horizon 2020 citizen science climate change, pollution and biodiversity projects a unique opportunity to share our findings with a global audience. By applying the UNESCO Open Science principles it will make it possible for communities around the world to replicate our projects and scale up from local European pilots to both regional and global scale.
Martin Brocklehurst, the Chair of this working group and a partner on the AURORA project, said “It is an exciting opportunity for project AURORA to share our approach and encourage Universities and Municipalities around the world to take and use our tools and work with their communities to drive personal carbon emissions down. With up to 30% of all carbon emissions due to citizen decisions on how we heat, cool and power our homes and make our travel decisions, real action by ordinary people can make a fundamental impact on carbon emissions. We owe it to our grandchildren to work to give them a future”.
