Environmental Ambassadors for Sustainable Development (Environmental Ambassadors, EASD) is a non-for-profit professional association focusing, among other,  work on research and science (professional and participant science/citizen science) promotion. EASD is the member of European Citizen Science Association.

With interest we are following the seventh session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention) taking place in Palais des Nations, Geneva from 18 to 21 October 2021. A number of substantive decisions are expected to be adopted at the session that will guide the activities of the Convention in the next intersessional period.

Among documents is document ECE/MP.PP/2021/20/Add.1. There, a number of definitions took our attention; some of them are:

• “Citizen science”, means a form of open collaboration in which members of the public participate voluntarily in the scientific process, engineering research or environmental monitoring in various ways;
• “Citizen science observatories”, refers to community-based environmental monitoring and information systems that invite individuals to share observations, typically via mobile telephone or the web;
• “Research data”, means documents in a digital form, other than scientific publications, which are collected or produced in the course of scientific research activities and are used as evidence in the research process, or are commonly accepted in the research community as necessary to validate research findings and results;
• “Citizen science data”, means data collected by members of the public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists, nongovernmental organizations and scientific institutions;
• “Citizen-generated data”, which means data produced through citizen sensing, citizen science and other forms of civic monitoring that share the common denominator that the data collection process is primarily carried out by volunteer individuals actively joining the initiative;