The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Thriving Earth Exchange program works with scientists and communities to enable them to do science together. Believing that every community science project should begin with community voice, be guided by community knowledge, and end in community impact, the program has enabled the integration of community science throughout the AGU. The authors share a model for how institutions can grow sustained community networks to address real world issues leading to lasting impacts for researchers and communities alike.
Imagine if people dealing with air and water pollution, extreme weather events, threatened natural resources, and other environmental concerns were able to mobilize scientific knowledge and processes to address those issues. Imagine that when science is happening in a community, about a community, or when that science could impact a community, that the community is part of that work. Imagine if the culture of science shifted so that working with communities to co-create and co-lead scientific solutions to address priorities together became the norm.
In Pinole, California, American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Thriving Earth Exchange brought together community representatives and scientists to demonstrate that with the power of science, communities can be at the forefront of changing local environmental issues, policies, and perspectives. Trash in Pinole Creek threatened the local flora and fauna throughout the approximately 39 square kilometers of the creek's local watershed.
To address this in 2019 the Thriving Earth project connected county residents, including high school students and community-based organizations, with a scientist who specializes in assessing solutions to plastic pollution and their effectiveness. Together, they worked to determine the source of trash in the creek, how much of a problem it was, and how to resolve the problem. The project team trained volunteers to collect data about trash found in the creek. They collected over 4000 kilograms of trash and to their surprise found that most of it was made of single-use plastic from everyday littering rather than large scale dumping.
The team presented formal recommendations to the City Council with ways they could address the littering, such as using project data to determine the most effective locations to install new trash bins and making changes to food packaging regulations to reduce plastic waste, both of which were formally implemented in 2024 as a direct result of the teams’ presentation. Additionally, the project team published their findings in AGU's peer-reviewed journal Community Science and went on to train more neighbors to conduct research, analyze and understand the data, and advocate for their community. As a result of the project, they started the Pinole Creek Alliesprogram where they co-host a creek cleanup every month with the support of community partners.
As his second AGU community science project, the Pinole Creek work further impacted the scientist who added publications to his resume and gained new perspectives on the value of practical, solutions science that engages communities. In a lessons learned document the team created, he noted that, “We educated and inspired students through the Earth Team and, in turn, they inspired me with their reflections and determination at the City Council meeting and other meetings [held prior] with the community.1 Even though the project has formally ended, he continues to engage the community and celebrate their wins.
The Pinole Creek project highlights one way that communities and scientists can work together to enact change at multiple levels such as empowering local communities with scientific access and solutions, and inspiring scientists to incorporate community engagement into future work and changing policies such as city regulations. Through the power of community science, AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange is shifting the culture of science and enabling more projects like Pinole Creek to co-create and co-lead scientific solutions that are addressing their priorities.
We have launched more than 360 community science projects since AGU launched Thriving Earth Exchange in 2013. As the world’s largest Earth and space sciences association, AGU’s mission is to support and inspire a global community interested in advancing discovery in Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity and the environment. The initial idea for Thriving Earth was to create a platform where scientists could share online how their research was impacting communities, but this simply encouraged scientists in doing what they always had: driving the research agenda where a community was merely the subject or target of research.
We needed a different approach. Our idea went through several evolutions and many discussions with our board and other thought leaders. Ultimately, we realized that communities needed to be respected as peers and collaborators for them to see that science could be relevant and meaningful in their lives.
Thriving Earth decided to use the term community science to describe this ethos. Borrowed from the fields of psychology and public health, community science happens when communities and scientists do science together to advance community priorities. “Doing science” includes defining questions, designing protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and using scientific knowledge in decision-making. Every community science project should begin with community voice, be guided by community knowledge, and end in community impact.
Getting to 360 projects has not been easy or straight forward. Early projects came about thanks to personal relationships of AGU staff and leadership, but the team soon realized that if we wanted to do more, we could not do it all by ourselves.
AGU is very familiar with traditional scientific collaborations that include partnerships with other societies, universities, and government agencies. However, if we wanted community science to benefit everyone, especially marginalized, historically harmed, and underserved communities, Thriving Earth needed to have relationships with those communities and the organizations that served them.
Recognizing our gaps allowed us to focus on finding those community-based organizations that did have relationships with the communities we wanted to support. Today, we have a robust and growing set of collaborations with non-profits, local and federal governmental agencies, and community-based organizations that bring additional skills and resources to projects and spread the word about the benefits of community science. Some collaborators work with us to support groups of projects that are launched together, often around a shared community interest or theme such as flooding or urban heat. 2
For example, in 2015, Thriving Earth connected with its first partner, ICLEI USA – Local Governments for Sustainability. ICLEI understands the power of connecting communities with science to develop tools and solutions. They connected us with five communities that year. Our next partners, the National League of Cities (NLC) and International City/County Managers Association (ICMA) helped us build relationships with cities and towns across the U.S. and globally. By 2017, Thriving Earth was beginning to establish a name for itself, and a fledgling group called Higher Ground (now, Anthropocene Alliance), reached out to us for scientific support for some communities in its network. Since then, we have supported over 70 communities through that partnership with scientific and technical expertise to which they previously did not have access. These collaborations have helped AGU’s transformation into a scientific society that truly supports a global community in advancing science for the benefit of humanity and the environment.
Collaboration helped Thriving Earth Exchange build trust with communities who had understandable reasons to doubt the intentions of scientists given the many past unethical scientific projects such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Project and nutritional research that starved Indigenous children. What might be surprising was that we also needed to build trust with scientific institutions whose staff and leaders were, at times, unsure about how to engage in this new type of role with communities. Participating in research where non-scientists are acknowledged as equal collaborators with vital knowledge and expertise was a significant shift away from traditional research and publishing models.
We invested a lot of time listening to both community representatives and scientists about their priorities, motivations, and constraints. For many scientists, there was an apprehension rooted in the fact that community work was not recognized with the same reward and esteem as other research when it comes to traditional academic career progression.
Researchers were also concerned about whether collaborative work with communities could retain the research integrity and robustness to result in good science and robust research outcomes. AGU addressed the first concern by integrating community science throughout our scientific society. We elevated it at our meetings, such as our annual conference where more than 25,000 scientists come from around the world to discuss and learn about new research. AGU also launched the journal Community Science, putting this type of work alongside traditional research in our portfolio of high-impact academic publications.
Community science, it turned out, was more than simply bringing people together. We need to invest - and are still investing - real effort into building a system that would address what both communities and scientists needed before community science could be something that everyone could meaningfully engage in together.
In many ways, building and managing trust between community and scientific groups is itself an act that changes the culture of how we do science. But trust can be a delicate and tenuous thing. For trust to turn into long-lasting change it requires action and a willingness to address systemic issues.
Approaching change from a co-production lens required rethinking what success and expertise looks like. For many scientists, success may be deeply intertwined with publishing peer-reviewed papers, but a paper by itself is not going to change a community’s situation. We learned to think of a paper as just one of the tools that can be used to legitimize community experiences and advocate for change.
The Pinole Creek project highlights the multifaceted approach that AGU takes through the Thriving Earth program: 1) further empower communities by connecting them to scientific knowledge and tools in ways that help them make meaningful and lasting changes; 2) connect across groups to foster action and collaborations that might not otherwise happen such as engagement between scientific institutions, non-profits, local businesses, community activists, students, etc. 3) amplify and legitimize community priorities by using scientific data and knowledge to support changes to policies and systems. By approaching this as a kind of cultural change, we are hopeful that these efforts will be sustainable.
Community science has the promise of supporting a shift in the culture of science from a top-down loading dock model of science to a more equitable and just approach. It does this by helping communities, especially those that have traditionally been left out or marginalized, develop trust in both science and scientists. Fostering this trust ensures that the benefits of scientific knowledge and processes can reach beyond the academy. Long term, communities that participate in science-based projects to improve their circumstances encourage the future use of evidence-based decision-making, as well as seeing themselves in the doing of that science.
Many in the scientific community want to make their research relevant to, used, and appreciated by the public. We can make this much more likely when the public is involved in that science and has opportunities to see why it matters to their everyday lives. Community science is a powerful way to make sure our science “benefits humanity and the environment.”
We hope you will join us in imagining together a better, more equitable scientific world and planting the seeds of community science in your own institutions.
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