Hello, this is Cynthia from Think-team.
I hope you are doing fine despite the pandemic situation.
Today, I had a course with the title, citizen science. Before coming to the class, I thought this course would talk about doing stakeholder engagement, mapping, interviews, and so forth. So, I thought this course would help me enrich or hopefully expedite my process in collecting narratives under the TIPPING+ project.
To my surprise, my assumption was apparently wrong! Apologies, as I am still exploring the beauty of social science ;) By definition, the lecturer that did her PhD about this topic elaborated as
Citizen Science is the involvement of non-professional scientist in a scientific project in meaningful way
So, it is not only about data collection, or we only ask society to answer our research questions; more than that, citizen science also explores how the participants can understand how the science works. Also, citizen here does not mean people with citizenship, it also refers to a community, indigenous people, or participants who are not professionally and academically trained for science.
This then made me remember one of su-re.co's activities in do-tank, climate field school (CFS). Since 2017, su-re.co has been working together with BMKG (Indonesia Met Agency) with the support from SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) to assist farmers in adapting to climate change. CFS is not about we, as the researchers, learn how farmers utilise their traditional knowledge in cultivating their plants; we also introduce the scientific knowledge about climate change so that the farmers are able to implement their agricultural practices according to the climate variabilities (e.g., precipitation, temperature).
In climate field school, the farmers also learn to observe their plants' physical condition before they decide what kind of treatment they want to deploy on their plants. It can be fertilization, weeding, or other procedures. It improves their decision-making for their agricultural practices under changing climate. Nowadays, su-re.co has been encouraging biogas technology as mitigation and adaptation strategies towards climate change (i.e., GHG reduction and organic fertilizer provision). Hopefully, increasing knowledge about climate change among farmers may lead to more and more biogas acceptance among farmers, particularly in rural areas.
Thank you for reading my blog! See you next time! 🤗