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Climate change is a planetary phenomenon, but climate vulnerability is a local and non-homogeneous experience. To understand and mitigate these effects, we must integrate local observations with global risk assessments. Citizen science can play a crucial role in this process by enabling data collection over large areas and extended periods, filling important gaps in our knowledge.
This presentation focuses on a citizen science initiative born from a people's pedagogy project aimed at creating youth environmental activists in the Indian Sundarbans, one of the world's most deprived and climate-vulnerable regions. The Sundarbans is a hydrologically active delta at the confluence of three rivers on the India-Bangladesh border. Our work involves youth from communities spread across 54 islands on the Indian side, protected by 3500 km of embankments against saltwater intrusion.
These island inhabitants have been historically marginalized in terms of access to resources and opportunities. They now confront additional challenges from climate change, including sea level rise, changing monsoon patterns, coastal erosion, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
This initiative, conducted in collaboration with a grassroots agricultural workers' union (Paschimbanga Khetmajoor Samity or PBKMS), aims to develop community organizers who will raise awareness about climate change in the Sundarbans and advocate for just and sustainable development. As part of their educational process, these youth activists conduct qualitative and quantitative research on the region's environmental history, impacts of environmental change, and community perceptions of risk and coping mechanisms.
Data analysis in workshop spaces aligns local learning with global expert knowledge, connecting socio-scientific factors influencing the region's development to the broader picture of a planet in peril. This analysis forms the foundation for organizing and advocacy work addressing ongoing damage and climate injustice.
We have created active citizen scientists in a situation where youth have internalized a hierarchy of knowledge from the mainstream education system and have stopped trusting their own capacity to observe changes in their own environment and in the society around them. The presentationI will convey the challenges associated with community-led research in a region where multiple erasures of culture and indigenous knowledge are at work and dominant climate reductive translations in the last decade have misunderstood the landscape and social inhomogeneities in ways that continue to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities. The role of an effective partner organization with deep roots in the community and their own well-formulated vision of the class struggle and a future society has been crucial. It has helped formulate an impactful transdisciplinary analysis where ecological concerns are aligned with socioeconomic concerns to create a perspective that is not focussed only on climate science but also on everyday struggles over access to livelihoods, food, housing, energy, and transportation.