Citizen Science and Climate Services in Cities: Current State, New Approaches and Future Avenues for Enhancing Urban Climate Resilience

Citizen engagement and co-design (sharing power and resources) between public administration and citizen groups has the potential to mobilize transformative societal shifts. The emergence of a new generation of interactive mobile technologies, boost Citizen engagement in climate monitoring and adaptation efforts and provide innovative avenues to enhance urban climate resilience, which are bottom-up and community-empowering. Through crowdsourcing and citizen sensing campaigns, citizens observe, collect and provide local data on climate events, local climatic conditions, impacts, and adaptation actions. In return, citizens receive information that empowers them to better understand their local environment and mitigate climate change impacts. The generation and use of co-produced climate services for urban decision-making and to assist climate change adaptation efforts in cities are increasingly recognized as solutions to increase climate resilience efficiency and effectiveness.

We intend to make this Research Topic a landmark in the scientific literature, which illustrates the potential, the challenges and opportunities of the unique role citizen science plays in the designing and development of urban climate services. We welcome submissions from all disciplines that explore – through case studies and actual projects – the range of and contributions of citizen science to the development of the next generation of urban climate services. Contributions that outline the future potential of citizen sensing and the role it can play in reaching urban climate resilience are particularly encouraged. Furthermore, we welcome papers that critically discuss shortcomings and challenges of citizen sensing models. We are also welcoming contributions that evaluate the process and impacts of citizen sensing approaches with regard to the notions of co-creation and the co-production of knowledge and its benefits for scientists, public organizations, policymakers, citizens, and society as a whole. We are also looking for papers that showcase the link of citizen science climate services and the potential of integrating them with data sources such as earth observation and big data in general.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Contribution of citizen science and crowdsourcing to the development of the next generation of urban climate services;
• Future potential of citizen sensing in reaching urban climate resilience;
• Challenges, barriers, limitations and failures in the creation and development of citizen climate services;
• Evaluation and ethics of citizen sensing processes and implementations with regard to co-creation methods and knowledge co-production;
• Co-design and co-governance between city administration and citizen groups for urban climate adaptation strategies;
• Links of citizen sensing with urban decision-making, policy-making, and the SDGs;
• Links of citizen sensing with data sources from earth observation and with big data; and
• Innovative developments regarding measurement techniques and sensors for urban citizen sensing (expandable to the aspects of data management and quality assurance).

We would like to acknowledge Dr. Christine Liang has acted as coordinator and has contributed to the preparation of the proposal for this Research Topic.

Keywords: citizen science, citizen sensing, climate services, climate adaptation, urban resiliance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.