Environmental Justice, Citizen Science and Pollution
By Meg Groom
February 2021
Toxic pollution (defined as pollution of the air, soil, water, or food that results in disease, abnormal behaviour, physical deformities, or death to those exposed or their children) is a persistent environmental justice issue. It continues to disproportionately affect communities of colour and low-income communities.
This article will explore the role of citizen science in democratizing environmental monitoring and discuss its potential to spark environmentally just action against pollution.
Citizen Science- or Sensing?
The term citizen science was coined by Alan Irwin in 1995 to highlight the importance of citizen expertise and knowledge for environmental policy. Though clearly environmental monitoring has been taking place long before 1995.
Citizen science practices today include varying levels of citizen engagement: from crowd funding to participation throughout the design, data collection and data analysis of a project. The most participatory forms of citizen science may often be classed as citizen sensing, which specifies the direct engagement of citizens with environmental monitoring techniques. Jennifer Gabrys, lead of the Citizen Sense project, argues that citizen sensing does not simply collect data, it also provides situations to collect and analyse data that are novel to conventional science.
Citizen Science and Pollution
In the context of pollution, communities have often been driven to carrying out their own participatory science to seek environmental justice. Such projects are sometimes stimulated when the data produced by multinational companies and environmental regulators is in contradiction to citizens’ lived experience. Whilst these projects often aim to contest previous studies, Barbara Allen specifies that the role of such citizen-led projects is not to fuel ‘anti-science’, but to strengthen traditional science with community knowledge on their health and local pollution.
Decisions on environmental burdens such as pollution are frequently made by those least likely to be directly affected; what is known as procedural justice can be found through recognising this. The participatory nature of citizen science improves the accessibility of discussions about decision making based on environmental data, ideally produced by and for those living with the environmental risks and hazards.
Citizen Sensing
Citizen Sensing is a project which investigates democratising environmental data and environmental monitoring technologies. One of their South London-based urban sensing projects provided citizens with mobile sensors to place around their community to monitor the air quality. The community and experts collaborated throughout the process, during: workshops to determine what questions the community wanted answers to, data collection, creating resources from the data to informal local decision making, and supporting campaigns to protect green spaces.
Another strength of this project was that it highlighted localized fluctuations of air quality in the city. Traditional official environmental monitoring investigations are often studying large areas of interest and investigating larger scale pollution patterns, meaning they may not detect local variations by design. The project demonstrated that pollution levels are affected by construction, road intersections and even proximity to the River Thames, filling in the finer details on the pollution map. This kind of citizen science is an opportunity to challenge and compliment traditional scientific findings.
Turning Data into Actions
As the world has witnessed with climate change, valid, ‘true’ environmental data does not necessarily result in more informed or changed policies. Citizen science does not inherently escape this issue, but can particular forms of participatory science act as effective ‘change-making’ knowledge? Allen argues that if citizen science is built upon the active participation and expertise of citizens, it can result in better community engagement with the data than if similar findings were found by a reputable, independent scientific body. She also argues that if the questions posed by the science are motivated by the community’s burning questions, environmental action is much more likely to result.
However, Thom Davies ` suggests that the citizen science seeking environmentally just solutions face challenges in achieving political consensus and action, because of the injustices built into the foundations of the change-making bodies. It is important to be aware of the limitations of citizen science, particularly when its findings are in direct conflict with political and scientific consensus. However, citizen science has the potential to strengthen and compliment traditional science when seeking political change.
Whilst participatory science still faces some of the challenges of conventional science, such as denial of science and a failure to develop findings into robust policy changes, it can provide different opportunities when fighting for a community’s environmental justice. It can reach conclusions more informed by local, lived experiences and engage citizens to participate in decision making based on these conclusions. These qualities may be instrumental in helping communities achieve justice from the toxic exposures to pollution in their environment.
You may also be interested in: An Introduction to the IPCC, The Inequalities of Climate Change, Climate Change and Air Pollution, The ‘Leaky Pipeline’ of Gender Equality in Ocean Science
References:
The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture (Chapter 9)
Citizen Sense Project https://citizensense.net/
Toxic Truths- Environmental justice and citizen science in a post-truth age https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526137005/9781526137005.xml
© 2021 Climate Just Collective