Empowering and Engaging Communities: Citizen Science on Climate Change Awareness

Climate change is considered by many to be the most daunting issue that has confronted human race. For the more than 20,000 families hardly hit and devastated by tropical storm Washi in 2011, this disastrous influence of climate change destroyed victims’ physical life and worse intensified their sufferings due to loss of loved ones, threat to life, loss of property and valuable resources. A recent study of the University assessed the typhoon victims coping strategies and activities in dealing with loss of property, life and livelihood in the relocation communities (Daan, 2015). It revealed that victims were able to cope with food, clothing, and shelter and other basic survival needs, but many were found to be still in different degrees of emotional distraught. This study is part of the University’s Climate Change Project aimed at empowering the typhoon survivors using the Climate Change Module as its initial vehicle for community organizing. It used Citizen Science as an approach and a discipline believing that most citizen science projects have underlying, testable assumptions that engaging the public in the process of research has scientific, educational, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes (Cooper et al., 2007 as cited by Toomey et al. 2013). Thus this study aimed to increase the survivors’ climate change awareness to ease the victims’ level of anxiety about climate change and to enhance their emotional coping capacities by increasing their knowledge, developing positive attitude and behavior on climate change. Results show that there were significant increases in their knowledge, attitude and potential behaviors regarding climate change.

Keywords: Climate Change, Citizen Science, Empowerment, Engagement