How can citizens investigate the effects of pollution in our daily lives?

CitieS-Health is a citizen science project focused on the environment and urban health. It develops initiatives in five diverse European cities (Barcelona, Kaunas, Ljubljana, Amsterdam, and Lucca), to assess air pollution and urban noise, wood burning, urban design, and local mobility. Specifically, CitieS-Health studies the link between these exposures and their impacts on health. To this end, citizens participate in all phases of the scientific studies: from defining research questions to designing and implementing studies, as well as analyzing and interpreting the results and communicating them. 

The projects constitute the first open set of tools for the development and promotion of citizen science initiatives in environmental epidemiology. They also co-design a set of governance principles and procedures to allow participants to control the data and outcomes of the project and contribute indicators to evaluate the project's impacts across different sectors. (H2020-Swafs-2018-19-824484)

In the Barcelona pilot, led by ISGlobal and Ideas For Change, the first step was to gather citizens' concerns about air pollution and health through a crowdsourcing effort via online surveys. These concerns helped us define the research question. The second step was to distribute one thousand strawberry plants, 100 in each of the 10 districts of the city, to create a pollution map in collaboration with the citizens of Barcelona.

With the results of health issues and the pollution map, we will develop the pilot study with the most affected communities willing to participate. The process is shared openly through the CitieS-Health website.