Verwandte Projekte

The AURORA Project is part of funding allocated by the Horizon 2020 Programme to support the EU Green Deal.

It is one of 15 projects empowering citizens for the transition towards a climate-neutral, sustainable Europe and is specifically focused on enabling citizens to act on climate change, for sustainable development and environmental protection through education, citizen science, observation initiatives, and civic engagement.

Details on projects included in the funded programme, as well as other sister projects, are shown below.

PSLifestyle

PSLifestyle will empower EU citizens to adopt a sustainable lifestyle and co-create versatile and topical data for decision makers on people’s readiness to change their consumption habits in a more sustainable direction. The project will create an online engagement tool that will offer personalised and culturally relevant suggestions through which people can build their own sustainable good life plans based on their carbon footprint. The lifestyle plans will provide insights for other societal stakeholders to help support the changes happening at the grassroots level.

COMPAIR

COMPAIR will increase citizens’ capacity to monitor, understand and change their environmental impact. It will encourage the use of a citizen science lab for widely available data on air quality to drive effective environmental change. Focusing on women, young people and hard-to-reach groups, it will provide the skills for them to co-design and undertake environmental scientific experiments around needs and challenges in their locality. To further raise awareness, the project will provide a citizen science lab toolkit.

ECF4CLIM

ECF4CLIM will develop, test and validate a European Competence Framework (ECF) for transformational change to empower the educational community to act. The project will apply an innovative hybrid approach based on participatory action research and citizen science to co-design an ECF that is adaptable to a range of settings and integrates digital and social competences related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. To encourage learning-by-doing, several innovative tools will be co-designed with and made available to citizens, including a digital platform for crowdsourcing, IoT solutions and a digital learning space.

GreenSCENT

Drawing from researchers and experts, as well as citizen participation and stakeholder engagement initiatives, GreenSCENT will develop a competency framework embracing all Green Deal focus areas, which include sustainable transport, a zero pollution Europe and the transition to a circular economy. The framework will take an approach based on participation, experience and learning-by-doing, and it will be tested in different European regions and at all education levels – from primary school to higher education and lifelong learning.

I-CHANGE

The European Green Deal has set the blueprint for a transformational change that will make Europe the first climate-neutral continent in the world. However, this will be difficult to achieve without the active involvement of citizens. With that in mind, I-CHANGE will promote the strong participation and creative role of citizens and civil society towards environmental protection, as well as changes in habits and the development of more sustainable standards. To that end, it will adopt a multi-disciplinary, participatory approach and create a set of living labs to increase the public’s awareness of the scientific processes underlying climate change.

SOCIO-BEE

Citizens and their communities can play an important role in achieving climate neutrality. Inspired by the bee metaphor (worker and drone bees as main ‘citizen science actors’), SOCIO-BEE will study the facilitation of structures to increase citizen engagement and awareness of climate change through experimentation and monitoring of the environment. The project aims to develop low-cost technological innovations and instruments that will tangibly contribute to the overall pro-climate campaign, with primary focus on improving air-quality in urban areas.

CLIMAS

Climate change impacts our society, economy and the environment. Unfortunately, efforts by policymakers, experts and other stakeholders are not enough. Citizen engagement is also needed. Climate assemblies and living labs are considered sustainable and reasonable tools to advance climate policymaking. The EU-funded CLIMAS project will develop an innovative problem-oriented climate adaptation toolbox codesigned with stakeholders by applying a values-based approach, design thinking methods, and citizen science mechanisms. The toolbox will anticipate possible tensions, points of controversy, and dilemmas and enable engagement strategies that produce a society ‘resilient by design’.

INCENTIVE

Citizen science is a broad term that encompasses that part of open science where citizens can participate in the scientific process in a variety of ways: by observing, analysing or producing data. Being pivotal to the democratisation of science, citizen science requires an adequate framework to function properly and to engage the public and stakeholders as much as possible. The EU-funded INCENTIVE project aims to support Europe’s research performing and funding organisations (RPFOs) in establishing sustainable transdisciplinary hubs for stimulating and supporting excellent citizen science. Besides being a sustainable institutional change themselves, citizen science hubs will serve as a vehicle for introducing considerable institutional changes in European RPFOs and their communities.

JUSTNature

Cities consume more than three-quarters of the world’s energy and produce more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions. Reversing this situation will turn cities into models, leading the way towards a low-carbon society. One way to do this is to ensure there is enough ecological space, for example regarding clean air, thermal comfort and biodiversity. However, this is often exclusive to high-income neighbourhoods. The EU-funded JUSTNature project will turn to nature-based solutions to ensure a just transition to low-carbon cities. Considering the right of all citizens to ecological space, the project will co-design new systems that conserve natural ecosystem values and functions and will ultimately provide numerous benefits to people.

UPSURGE

Tomorrow’s cities will be places of environmental regeneration. The EU-funded UPSURGE project will assist this urban transition by introducing the European Regenerative Urban Lighthouse. This will be used as a best-practice reference framework to enable the implementation of targeted nature-based solutions. In turn, cities will be called on to unlock their regenerative potential by applying the knowledge and guidance in regenerative transition. The project will carry out real-life demonstrations showcasing the viability, feasibility and implementability of proposed technical solutions. Project findings will be disseminated into several exploitable assets. The Lighthouse will help to expedite the overall renaturation of cities.

DivAirCity H2020

The COVID-19 pandemic shed light on the relationship between air-polluted areas and health and well-being. It also revealed the social inequalities in cities. In this context, the EU-funded DivAirCity project will shift the urban paradigm by valuing human diversity as an important resource. By focussing on the nexus between people, places and peace, the project will define new models towards cultural-driven green cities. Through citizen science and creativity, it will co-design solutions and trace their impact in a transparent and safe way. Involving five cities across Europe, DivAirCity will be run by a consortium of 26 EU organisations working with 68 partners from around the world to deliver more inclusive, healthy and equal cities.

A full list of citizen science projects in Europe can be found at EU Citizen Science. Globally details on citizen science projects can be found on the United Nations World Environment Situation Room (WESR) Citizen Science Portal and on SciStarter .  
 
Project AURORA is working with the Citizen Science Global Partnership and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) to fully integrate the WESR with the work of Regional Citizen Science Associations in AfricaAsia, Australia  South America (also see citizen science platform CIVIS) and the United States of America. This is part of project AURORA’s communication plan to ensure our work can be shared across Europe on the European Citizen Science Platform, through cooperation with the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) and globally with the CSGP, UNEP, the United Nations Science Policy Business Forum (UNSPBF), the United Nations Major Groups – Science and Technology Major Group and the Regional citizen science associations.
 
This is a powerful way to spread our ideas on how to tackle climate change and to encourage other citizen scientists across the world to use the AURORA Energy app and share our ideas on how to develop Community Energy Groups in Universities and Municipalities. Only by working together in this way can citizens make a difference.
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