Community science最新文献

Transportation is a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and has become a focus for climate policies. Traffic-related air pollution disproportionately affects environmental justice (EJ) communities—neighborhoods that have disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, but health impact assessments rarely center EJ issues or prioritize the concerns of EJ communities. One explanation for the lack of focus on EJ communities is that both policymakers and academia have often failed to engage these communities. In this paper, academic researchers collaborate with seven EJ organizations in the northeastern US, working with collaboration advisors and facilitators, to design and evaluate potential transportation emissions reduction scenarios using air quality and health benefits modeling tools. We model and estimate the benefits of these scenarios, while working to build collaborative relationships between academic researchers and EJ organizations. The two primary outputs from this process are: quantification of health benefits attributable to emission reduction scenarios of interest to EJ organizations, and enhanced trust and community building between academic researchers and EJ organizations, with reflections on strengths, challenges, and opportunities for future work. We find the largest improvements to health result from scenarios that reduce car and truck traffic. Dialog between academic researchers and EJ organizations reinforce the disconnect between regional-scale models and local community concerns as well as the more general gaps between statistical models and lived experience. Despite these challenges, the collaboration led to more meaningful models and valued insight for community organizations, and we recommend comparable collaborations in other settings where pollution control is being planned and evaluated in EJ communities.

The amount of household waste produced worldwide is increasing every year. In combination with other actions to reduce waste production and improve waste management, community engagement and community-focused programs are needed to motivate the public to change their behavior in such a way that reduces their waste generation and increases the accuracy of waste sorting. It is also helpful for people to become more waste literate to empower them to be part of the solution. The Home Waste Audit (HWA) is a community science activity designed to increase waste literacy and reduce household waste. In the HWA, participants record their waste for a set period of time, research their local waste streams, and complete surveys to share perceptions of household waste habits. Here, we present data from a HWA conducted in 2021 as a case study. Before the audit, 66% of participants underestimated their weekly waste generation. Throughout the HWA, weekly waste count among households decreased by 31%. Participants found purchasing items with less/no packaging and avoiding single-use plastics challenging. Easier changes included learning which items can/cannot be recycled and repurposing waste items. Several changes to waste habits were maintained 1 year after participation. These results demonstrate that the HWA is an effective tool for individuals to be a part of the solution by learning about local waste streams, reducing waste production, and accurately managing their household waste.

The editors of the Community Science Exchange want to say a big thank you to the 29 reviewers for reviewing for Community Science in 2023. Peer-review is essential to the process of doing and publishing scientific findings, and will be a pillar of our successful expansion of science by, with and for communities into mainstream science. Many papers start with an inquiry, allowing us to assist prospective authors in inclusion of community voice. These consultations also allow us to respect reviewers' time as we only send papers for review that meet our criteria.

Fire is one example of a larger class of wicked environmental management problems that require community-based management for long-term success. This study aimed to support participatory decision making in a data poor and complex system by using Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) within the decision-making framework Structured Decision Making (SDM) to develop a community-based wildfire management plan in partnership with a local group in Wai‘anae Hawaiʻi. SDM is an organized process to create and evaluate decisions that can clarify trade-offs and increase transparency. FCM is a semi-quantitative method to describe system relationships that can handle low data and high uncertainty. We used SDM to define the problem, articulate community concerns related to wildfire, and identify management actions. We then used FCM to model how these actions affected valued ecosystem services and other stakeholder-identified objectives. Modeling results highlighted the trade-offs across three valued ecosystem services from three community-led wildfire management actions. We found that native species outplanting was the most beneficial action to each of the three valued ecosystem services. Through this participatory research, we conclude that the SDM and FCM pairing provided an inclusive and cost-effective way to engage with a specific wildfire management context, and that the process effectively engaged stakeholders while tackling uncertainty. This process also aided consensus-building and group member communication. This pairing can be used to aid community decision-making across diverse management problems as it provides a way to elicit objectives and model trade-offs, even under uncertainty and data limitations, while including stakeholders impacted by such decisions.

The ethical responsibilities of science, scientists and scholarly work are continuously expanding in response to changes and advancements in science and the scientific and social environment in which it is practiced. Here we define science broadly to include all disciplinary forms: natural, social, health. Within the realm of scholarly publication in science, ethics has become much more than “don't plagiarize,” or “do no harm” and now includes ethical framing around who does science, how science is done, what questions the work is tackling and where those questions spring from, what epistemologies are relevant, respected and accounted for, who has access to outcomes, how those outcomes are made accessible, who “owns” outcomes, and indeed, what ownership means. Questions of ethical community engagement both contribute to and benefit from our expanding understanding of what it means to do science ethically. This editorial is offered with recognition of that larger context, while focusing on community engagement.

In the search for democratizing science and broadening its utility and benefits to all people, a growing number of disciplines have come to value more collaborative, co-produced and community-engaged approaches to science. Many have argued that when science is truly useful to communities—especially those experiencing science, economic, social, cultural and/or health marginalization—it is better science. It becomes science with an improved ability to ensure both science literacy and public trust, even as it adds to existing scientific knowledge and methodology.

In response to this movement, and to further it, public and private funders are expanding support for community-engaged science across the widest range of communities. Ever more communities are calling for their own science findings to become action and ultimately move into policy. And researchers are now expected to consider research utility and broader impacts, and to address issues of exclusion and bias in their conduct and publication of research. All of this work is guided by evolving statements of diversity, equity and inclusion/belonging (DEI). Thus DEI and science collaboration with a diversity of publics and their communities are inextricably linked.

To proactively highlight and frame the centrality of ethics to the work of community science, including its publications and representations, this editorial presents a “living statement” of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Ethics for the Community Science Exchange, as well as expectations for CSE authors, editorial board, and staff partners. By “living,” we mean that ethical considerations are ongoing, and will change as community science grows and evolves.

Humanity faces grand challenges—climate change, energy sustainability, public health, ecosystem resilience, repairing injustices, advancing equity, and well-being—to which science can contribute. None of these challenges can be addressed by

The circular economy has been promoted as a solution to plastic pollution, but cities and communities bear the brunt of plastic pollution. The Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP) is a systems method of collaborative and open data collection for communities to use for decision- and policy-making. The CAP has been utilized in 51 cities in 14 countries and is illustrated here in Metro Manila. Results include identifying manufacturing and parent companies to bring to the table; documenting most (77%) products are in single-use multi-layer film packaging; a small, but growing formal refill and reuse system; 10% of to-go food containers composed of paper-based alternatives, and a snap-shot leakage concentration of plastics to the environment that is 1.8%–2.7% of current waste generation. Community narratives emerged from a collaborative workshop and are threaded throughout opportunities identified by the CAP process to inform circularity, future actions, and policy, as a scalable way to create systems change for plastic pollution from the ground up.

As the Arctic and its rivers continue to warm, a better understanding of the possible future impacts on people would benefit from close partnership with Indigenous communities and scientists from diverse fields of study. We present efforts by the Arctic Rivers Project to conduct community-engaged research to increase collective understanding of the historical and potential future impacts of climate change on rivers, fish, and Indigenous communities. Working in central to northern Alaska and the Yukon Territory in Canada, the project seeks to engage with Indigenous communities in ethical and equitable ways to produces science that is useful, useable, and used that may serve as an example for future research efforts. Toward this goal, we formed an Indigenous Advisory Council and together developed project-specific knowledge co-production protocols. This paper provides a novel model of design and implementation to co-produce knowledge with communities across a large study domain.

Resilience, specifically community resilience, has a range of definitions but several core elements, including social cohesion and collaboration. Importantly, community-driven goals and approaches tend to be more effective. The CREATE Resilience project centered on co-creating a community vision of resilience, specifically as it relates to natural hazards and climate change by focusing on a positive narrative. By engaging youth, artists, municipal officials and community members in a variety of activities, including surveys, story-gathering and photovoice exhibits, forums, artist-created murals, and ripple effect mapping (REM), the project increased knowledge of weather and climate, risks from local hazards, and strategies for mitigation, while leading the community in thinking about what resilience means. This article describes the project, its use of science, art, and community to co-create a vision of resilience for three communities, the components of engagement and their intent, and the evaluation of impact for participants. As determined through surveys and REM, the CREATE project was effective due to the mixture of art, science and community engagement, which provided a range of opportunities for personal connection and learning related to the science and priorities around hazards and mitigation, helping participants with meaning-making about local hazards and assets, and allowing for a sense of familiarity and interconnectedness. Creating a shared vision of resilience is an effort that engages, connects, and motivates a community around common values and goals, and the approaches implemented through the CREATE project may offer ideas other communities can adopt in efforts to improve resilience.

The editors of the Community Science Exchange want to say a big thank you to the nine inaugural reviewers for Community Science in 2022. Peer-review is essential to the process of doing and publishing scientific findings, and will be a pillar of our successful expansion of science by, with and for communities into mainstream science.

Many papers start with an inquiry, allowing us to assist prospective authors in inclusion of community voice. These consultations also allow us to respect reviewers' time as we only send papers for review that meet our criteria.

As the newest journal, we still have few enough reviewers that we do not want to identify them by name. But you know who you are! Please accept our sincere thanks for generously sharing your expertise and working to improve Community Science.