Europe Accelerates Citizen Science
Two Horizon Europe sister projects reveal new approaches to scaling citizen science, empowering communities, researchers, and policymakers to jointly tackle the EU Missions.
CROPS and ScienceUs are sister projects, launched under the same call to strengthen the citizen science ecosystem in Europe. Together, they illustrate two complementary approaches to a shared challenge: how to grow citizen science responsibly, effectively, and sustainably.
New paper out now: Why Citizen Science is Now Essential for Official Statistics
The termination in February 2025 of the Demographic and Health Surveys, a critical source of data on population, health, HIV, and nutrition in over 90 countries, supported by the United States Agency for International Development, constitutes a crisis for official statistics. This is particularly true for low- and middle-income countries that lack their own survey infrastructure. At a national level, in the United States, proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency by the current administration further threaten the capacity to monitor and achieve environmental sustainability and implement the SDGs. Citizen science now can and must step up and play a more central role in official statistics. Our analysis found that that citizen science data could potentially support 48 (or 60%) of the indicators that currently rely on household surveys across 13 SDGs.
We need a fundamental shift in how we view citizen science. Official statistics and policy communities have long seen it as a secondary data source, with concerns over data quality and limited awareness of its potential. They must recognize data generated by the public voluntarily as an essential contribution to official statistics.
Embracing citizen science requires shifting perspectives and rethinking established practices to build more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable statistical systems. This means continuing to fund official surveys and environmental monitoring while also investing in citizen science to create more adaptive and flexible ways of collecting data, especially in turbulent times.