MAKE CITIZEN DATA COUNT
The Make Citizen Data Count Campaign
Citizen scientists helped expose the water crisis. Now the Government is drawing up its Clean Water Bill and they are being ignored again. We are calling on the Government to:
Integrate citizen science data into official monitoring programmes.
Formalise citizen science’s role in the Regional Systems Planners.
Create catchment data platforms, featuring regulatory, water industry and citizen data.
The Water White Paper that will shape the Bill runs to 50 pages. Citizen science is not mentioned once.
Yet, more than 21,000 volunteers have spent tens of thousands of hours testing our rivers, analysing data and holding polluters to account. That evidence is being left out of the new regulatory system and we are demanding that changes.
The Cunliffe Review recommended that there should be a democratic element of regional decision making. Yet, no commitments have been made. Citizen scientists are obvious candidates to a seat at the table, with deep knowledge about their rivers, lakes, and seas. The Government must commit to involving citizen scientists in the new regional planning system to give people and nature a voice.
Make Citizen Data Count sets out exactly how citizen science can be formally embedded into the Water Reform Bill, drawing on what already works in the US and the strong foundations already laid here in the UK. Add your voice today.
What you can do
SIGN THE PETITION - Make the Government use citizen data to improve monitoring of our waterways, better direct investment and protect the environment.
SHARE THE REPORT - Send it to anyone who tests their local river, cares about clean water, or wants to see the public properly represented in how our water is governed. The more people who read it, the harder it is to ignore.
The citizen science initiatives supporting this campaign involve:
21,324 volunteers
20,830 hours spent by volunteers
61,042 water quality samples analysed
2375 invertebrate surveys
If you’ve read the report and scrolled this far, then why not read our paper which asks what citizen scientists can do to make use of their data easier to regulators?
The paper follows the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which allows citizen data to be used in official reports, allowing citizens to genuinely impact decisions over where to invest, where to better protect, and where to better direct state-funded monitoring resources. We have laid the foundations for this in the UK, with the key barrier being the lack of legal route to regulators, as is provided in the US. Once this is removed, huge resources will be unlocked via citizen science initiatives.
The paper sets out how the UK can tailor the US EPA’s approach in the UK, building upon the work already performed by the Environment Agency’s Technical Advisory Framework, which could lay a foundation for the data governance principles which citizen scientists should follow to enable use by regulators.
Crucially, the data principles set out in the paper are not seeking a ‘tiered,’ or ‘once-size-fits-all’ set of criteria which must be met in order for data to be considered. What is presented is a set of guiding principles for good data practice, the more of which are followed, would allow the regulators to more easily understand the data’s benefits, and limitations, and therefore make use of it within a weight of evidence approach.
The government must first unblock the road for citizen data to be used by the regulators in the Clean Water Bill. If you haven’t already, then sign the petition to CALL FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO MAKE CITZEN DATA COUNT: