Reflection of the Sustainable Development Goals in Citizen Science Projects

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is necessary to consolidate efforts at various levels of economic systems and use the most appropriate approaches and tools at each of them. Our study focuses on citizen science as a promising tool to achieve the SDGs. The study aims to identify how SDG achievement can be facilitated by means of citizen science. As a concept, citizen science can be viewed as a specific process of cognition happening in the course of open scientific communication. As an actual practice, it encompasses projects with a number of particular characteristics. Our study is based on analysis, synthesis, comparison, and classification and relies on knowledge-based, participatory, and network approaches. It uses materials from the Russian Association for Science Communication, the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation, the European Citizen Science Association, and online citizen science platforms. The study has identified three domains in citizen science that contribute to SDG achievement. The knowledge-based domain consists of using the SDGs to measure the relevance and social significance of individual citizen science projects. The technological domain consists of the digital environment, where citizen scientists develop their communication and network skills, and an increasingly greater number of participants become interested in transforming the world in accordance with the SDGs. The participatory domain contributes to disseminating sustainable development norms and values and becomes more important when volunteers’ competence grows as they move to higher levels in citizen science project management. Further research can focus on developing approaches for integrating citizen science projects and sustainable development processes at the levels of content, tools, and values.