Heat Watchers in Action: Citizen science for inclusive climate resilience

Heat Watchers in Action is a citizen science initiative promoted by scientists from Institut Metròpoli and IREC and policy-makers from the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, in collaboration with public primary schools, to understand and disseminate the urban impacts of climate change and to foster inclusive resilience by engaging children and parents from urban vulnerable areas. Citizen scientists are trained and equipped to monitor environmental comfort inside their households, co-interpret the results and participate in the co-creation of potential solutions to enable and accelerate equitable child-oriented adaptation to extreme heat. 

Our project contributes to project-based experiential learning on the local effects of climate change and potential resilient futures, while leading to more effective and equitable climate adaptation by generating and disseminating novel real data, actionable knowledge, and policy-informative research. By empowering vulnerable children and families in the transformation and adaptation of cities we expect to accelerate climate change awareness and justice, while contributing to bridge education with science and viceversa.

Heat Watchers in the classroom

To train children as heat watchers we have designed four sessions:

• The first session (Seeking Heat Watchers) aims to present the project and invite students to participate as heat watchers.
• The second and third sessions (We are Heat Watchers) focus on training citizen scientists so that they understand both perceived thermal comfort and measured parameters of comfort including temperature, humidity and CO2.
• Finally, the last session (Heat Watchers in Action!) aims to share results, co-interpret them, and co-create potential solutions for equitable child-oriented adaptation.

All pedagogical materials, including guides, presentations, activities and supplementary materials are being designed to be downloadable and customizable.

Heat Watchers at households

Children engaged as heat watchers are also equipped with a kit to conduct the monitoring campaign at their houses, during the second and the third session. The Kit of Heat Watchers includes:

• Heat Diary: to record their thermal sensation and preference each day of the campaign
• Household questionnaires: to collect household basic characteristics and adults perceptions of comfort
• Sensors: to measure temperature, humidity and CO2 concentration at the living’s room and measure temperature at children’s and parents’ rooms

Actionable knowledge to promote equitable adaptation

While the project expects to provide real data about indoor environmental comfort and the local effects of climate change on households with children to inform and improve public policies, it also aims to visibilize the creative perspectives and original solutions provided by children when adapting to heat and the climate emergency.

In this regard, children perceptions on potential adaptation pathways towards resilient lifestyles, houses, and cities are collected through the last pages of the Heat Diaries and further elaborated during the last session at the school.

Healthy icecreams, colourful shading systems, or safer routes to get to the nearest bathing place have emerged as children-oriented options to cope with heat.

Pilot in the metropolis of Barcelona and next editions

The first pilot of Heat Watchers in action has been developed at the metropolitan area of Barcelona (Spain), a dense urban area of 636 km2 inhabited by 3,2 million people and integrated by 36 municipalities. During the summer of 2024, trained scientists engaged schools from socio-environmentally disadvantaged neighborhoods highly vulnerable to heat. A hundred children aged 10 to 12 years old were engaged through the workshops, the monitoring campaigns and the whole citizen science process.

In 2025, the project will be included as a Service-Learning Project at the environmental education program Sharing the Future (Compartim un Futur) promoted by the metropolitan government of Barcelona (AMB) and therefore offered to other schools.

Moreover, schools and teachers willing to be engaged as Heat Watchers will have all the available materials to autonomously conduct the training sessions at the classroom and the monitoring at student’s households. Online capacity-building workshops are planned to be offered to teachers and other stakeholders interested in replicating or adapting the project. 

This citizen science initiative has also been supported by the program IMPETUS (funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101058677), as an initiative addressing the challenge of justice and equity in the category of climate resilience.

You can find further information and download the project materials (in Catalan) here:

https://vigilantsdelacalor.institutmetropoli.cat/

You can find a summary of the citizen science initiative (in English) here:

https://impetus4cs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Heat-WatchErs-in-ACTion-2.pdf