Work Package 2A1 aims to map gaps and opportunities for community engagement in environmental matters in Ukraine.
The present document precisely outlines gaps and opportunities in environmental citizen science and civic monitoring in war-torn Ukraine, maps actors within the field and provides an overview of frameworks to foster community engagement in environmental monitoring with an eye to post-war environmental recovery. The research has been conducted mostly by reviewing secondary data and grey literature, selected in line of the aim to identify gaps and opportunities.
We discuss the findings and the methods employed, and present tools that might be helpful for further research but also for concerned and interested civil society. The key lessons learned include: insights from comparable experiences of community engagement deployed in armed conflicts and during peacetime in other countries; the value of applying to the Ukrainian context methodologies that can be valuable for studying citizen science and civic environmental monitoring experiences and to assess war-induced environmental harms; the importance of considering useful frameworks for leveraging community engagement in Ukraine; the relevance of an analysis of displacement and belonging, displacement and vulnerability, environmental justice and intersectional dimensions; the importance to also consider technical gaps such as data availability, access to sites, risks for civil society engaged in citizen science and civic environmental monitoring activities; the contribution of a stakeholder mapping exercise to the present project.