Co-created Citizen Science Creates Space for Dialogue Around Environmental Challenges Faced by Urban Residents in the Global South

In the Global South, rapid, unplanned urbanisation is associated with environmental degradation, pollution, and poor basic services, in particular for resource poor and vulnerable communities. With insufficient resources available for standardised monitoring of these issues, citizen science (CS) approaches have the potential to address evidence gaps and inform mitigation strategies and environmental policies. The majority of CS projects reported in the scientific literature are contributory, involving members of the public only in the data collection aspects of projects. There is growing recognition of the benefits of co-created CS, where participants are engaged in multiple or all stages of the scientific process. However, descriptions and evaluations of such projects are rarely reported in the literature, which is needed in order to refine and grow the use of co-created CS. Here, a review of the co-created CS literature is presented, followed by a six-step, researcher-initiated co-created CS methodology which was implemented with vulnerable communities within two cities in the Global South – Nakuru, Kenya and Udon Thani, Thailand. Successes and challenges experienced in these projects are discussed and recommendations for future co-created CS are presented. As for contributory CS, data generated in projects concretely identified environmental challenges faced by each community. However, using the six-step co-created CS methodology, participating citizens were uniquely able to leverage their data on behalf of their communities to establish dialogue with local authorities, generating meaningful shared understanding and priorities.