Our Climate Futures: Participatory Science on a Great Lake (2025-02-03 and 2025-02-04)

Abstract

As climate change intensifies, there is an urgent need to expand environmental monitoring to track trends and extreme events. This work is typically conducted by national agencies and universities. Yet citizens in our region�s rural, urban, and tribal lands also care deeply about climate change and its impacts. Researchers can tap into this energy through participatory science projects that are mutually beneficial, especially if there is equitable representation of local communities in terms of age, socioeconomic status, and racial identity. Aside from increasing data collection, community engagement opens up a wider range of perspectives and lived experiences which modify research questions, address environmental and social inequities, reduce data bias, and build trust between researchers and the community. The goal of this conference is to facilitate community conversations that lead to equitable participatory science projects that lead to impactful adaptation and mitigation action.