GNGTS 2023 - Atti del 41° Convegno Nazionale

Session 2.3 GNGTS 2023 Citizen Science and Engagement: from target to data provider S. Sterlacchini 2 , P. Salvati 1 , D. Voltolina 2 and I. Marchesini 1 1 CNR-IRPI 2 CNR-IGAG Nowadays, citizens are frequently 'inundated' with information from institutional sites and websites for all sorts of reasons. Among the others, Civil Protection information should be of great interest to plan various kinds of activities, from work to leisure. But is this really the case? The main purpose of our presentation is to show some activities carried out with different population groups (from high school students to volunteers) aimed at changing the communication paradigm defined so far. The pros and cons of moving from a top down communication (from the institution to the population) to a bottom up one, where the citizens change their status of target of the information into data provider, are assessed. For this reason, information campaigns were organized to raise communities’ risk awareness and perception and improve the pro-active communities’ resilience with the final aim at reducing the effects of unexpected adverse geo-hydrological events. In addition to theoretical lessons, low-cost user-centered Web Applications were designed, implemented and deployed for environmental data collection and sharing, based on a Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) participatory mapping approach. This non-structural geo-hydrological risk mitigation measure allowed students and volunteers living in most-at-risk area to collect and share in real-time geolocalized data concerning natural hazards (data providers). paola.salvati@irpi.cnr.it