Air pollution is the environmental topic that European citizens worry about most. It is responsible for 400.00 premature deaths in Europe each year, damages agricultural crops and forests, and its effects result in actual losses for the European economy -estimated costs for Europe between €59 and €189 billion in 2012 -, threating human well-being and natural systems that sustain our prosperity. CAPTOR address the general air pollution problem, which will be depicted by monitoring specifically the tropospheric ozone.
Current top-down efforts have obviously increased awareness among citizens about the dangers of polluted air, but despite all this efforts real affection and behavioural change, taking ownership and responsibility, cannot be found on large scale. Europeans are worried about the general state of the environment but their readiness to take action themselves when it comes to tackling environmental challenges is limited. Moreover, decision makers are often reluctant to put the necessary emphasis on the dangers involved with high air pollution levels, because the primary source - that could be quite easily reduced - is the individual traffic. Reducing the individual traffic is known to be a very difficult political task and is not at all popular with the voters.
Captor proposes a bottom-up approach to demonstrate the power of Collective Awareness Platforms (CAPs) to foster collaboration of local communities, citizens, NGOs, and scientists to raise awareness and find solutions to the air pollution problem. The combination of citizen science, collaborative networks and environmental grassroots social activism will drive the whole process and will have a high potential impact on other fields such as education, social innovation, science, environment, politics and industry (see figure 1). Captor will establish a monitoring network made of low-cost sensors to measure ozone pollution in affected areas and to use collaborative learning tools to stimulate collaborative solution finding.
Captor's concrete objectives are:
• To engage a network of local communities in three citizen science instantiations for monitoring a specific air pollutant - tropospheric ozone.
• To engage these local communities in a collaborative learning process about air pollution, supporting a bottom-up process of defining and designing measures for action. This will demonstrate the effectiveness of a model of social innovation strategy based on a CAP to leverage the collective intelligence of existing networks of local communities.
• To empower citizens and engage them in promoting behavioural changes and active participation in decision making to drive solutions. The project will stimulate discussion of local communities involved in the project with different stakeholders – energy and transport industries, local administrations, scientists, academia and innovators - to promote best practices and advocate plans to control and reduce air pollution.
• To learn and to assess the effectiveness, replicability and creative power of the approach. The project will provide evidence of its impact and derive lessons learned for similar initiatives.
