Tracking progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires high-quality, timely, and accessible data, often in areas where data are rarely available. Problems exist due to socioeconomic variations between countries and the qualitative nature of certain indicators in their definition. Citizen science has the potential to contribute to several SDGs. However, whilst citizen science’s potential to contribute towards SDGs is well documented, limitations exist when measuring the impact that citizen science has made toward SDG progress. To better understand the issues and prospective solutions surrounding impact assessment towards SDG progress, this work presents the outcomes of semi-structured interviews with citizen science project coordinators. They reveal the complex nature of impact assessment within a citizen science context. Coordinators demonstrate greater confidence when the project is easier to relate to the SDGs, and the project methodology can objectively measure indicators. Issues exist, however, when considering SDGs with a broader, global context, those more difficult to link to project goals and when the project’s impact on them happens at timescales beyond the funding period. If the full potential of citizen-science contributions to the SDGs is to be realised, approaches are needed to fully consider practitioners’ needs and motivations.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an important global framework which provides a shared vision for a more sustainable future for all people and the planet. In the last five years, citizen science as a discipline has paid increasing attention to the SDGs and the contributions that citizen science could make towards their achievement. This paper presents a collection of 51 questions and a corresponding set of answers which can be used by citizen science projects to self-assess their impact towards the SDGs. The questions and answers were originally derived from the official UN description of the SDG targets and indicators and were refined through a workshop and series of nine interviews with citizen science project coordinators. The outcomes of the workshop and interviews reveal the challenges of assessing impacts towards the SDGs in a way which is relevant to the majority of citizen science projects. In many cases, the wording of the SDGs had to be altered to make sense in the context of citizen science. The final set of questions and answers are structured to reflect two pathways of impact: citizen science contributing to the (official) monitoring of the SDGs, and citizen science contributing to the direct achievement of the SDGs.

The marine environment is facing serious changes. This requires scientific understanding of the ocean’s responses to pressures and management actions to provide the foundation for sustainable development. At the same time, the production of knowledge for a more sustainable world is undergoing rapid change with the uptake of citizen science as means of opening up science. While there is increasing interest in marine citizen science, it is also often conceived as lagging behind citizen science in other areas, such as biodiversity related citizen science on land. This paper analyses empirical evidence collected >1260 past and present marine citizen science initiatives, substantiating the pervasiveness of marine citizen science around the globe. In doing so, it provides the basis for a cumulative inventory of MArine Citizen Science Initiatives (MARCSI) that can inform and shape both the growing community of marine citizen science practitioners and the science of citizen science.

Human activities continue to degrade oceanic, coastal and inland waters. The generational change in the role of society in actively looking after the health of water resources can be achieved through the expansion of ocean and water literacy in schools. The Network of European Blue Schools established under the EU4Ocean Coalition for Ocean Literacy has improved ocean and water literacy; however, this Network needs to grow and be supported. Here, we present ProBleu, a recently funded EU project that will expand and support the Network, partly through the use of citizen science. The core of the proposed methodology is facilitating school activities related to ocean and water literacy through funding calls to sustain and enrich current school activities, and kick-start and support new activities. The outcomes of the project are anticipated to have widespread and long-term impacts across society, and oceanic, coastal and inland water environments.

Citizen science has long been used as an approach across different disciplines, both in terms of the science produced, and the democratisation of the process to involve all stakeholders that have a vested interest. However, whilst citizen science’s potential to contribute towards such concerns is well documented, limitations exist when measuring the impact that citizen science has made. Despite multiple attempts across the literature, there remains no formal process by which to assess a citizen science project’s impact and to accurately compare that impact with other projects, traditional science, or the status quo. The MICS (Measuring the Impact of Citizen Science) project has developed an online platform and toolbox that citizen-science project coordinators can use to assess the impact of their activities, whilst generating comparable results across the citizen science landscape. MICS considers impact across five domains (environment, society, economy, governance, and science and technology), and consists of approximately 200 indicators - implemented in the form of questions - designed to find out as much information as is possible about a project’s intended or achieved impact across these domains. These 200 indicators have been generated and refined through a combination of literature reviews, workshops and iterative interviews to capture as much information about impact as possible. The MICS platform and assessment-approach have been demonstrated to a number of project coordinators from a range of projects. In this work, we present the design of the platform, and demonstrate its relevance to citizen science, and suitability for measuring its impact.

Human activities continue to degrade oceanic, coastal and inland waters. The generational change in the role of society in actively looking after the health of water resources can be achieved through the expansion of ocean and water literacy in schools. The Network of European Blue Schools established under the EU4Ocean Coalition for Ocean Literacy has improved ocean and water literacy; however, this Network needs to grow and be supported. Here we present ProBleu; a recently funded EU project that will expand and support the Network, partly through the use of citizen science. The core of the proposed methodology is facilitating school activities related to ocean and water literacy through funding calls to sustain and enrich current school activities, and kick-start and support new activities. The outcomes of the project are anticipated to have wide and long-term impacts across society, oceanic, coastal and inland water environments.