MoRe4nature - Empowering citizens in collaborative environmental compliance assurance via MOnitoring, REporting and action

© European Union, 2023
Co-Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Project name: Empowering citizens in collaborative environmental compliance assurance via MOnitoring, REporting and action
Acronym: more4nature
Project page: https://www.more4nature.eu/

About the project

MoRe4nature aims to launch transformative changes in conservation efforts toward zero pollution, biodiversity protection, and deforestation prevention by engaging citizens and communities as key participants in Environmental Co-Responsibility (ECA).

A key element in reversing the trend of environmental degradation is improving measures to ensure compliance with environmental requirements. Citizen Science Initiatives (CSI) represent innovative ways of co-producing data and knowledge while empowering citizens to sustainably manage natural resources. MoRe4nature will use a socio-technical approach to address these challenges and deepen the role of citizens and communities in ECA by:

Strengthening the capacity of existing CSIs to provide relevant and reliable data and understanding of the importance of ECA,
Facilitating and supporting cooperation and partnerships between citizen science initiatives and public authorities to bridge data gaps and establish a foundation for policy monitoring,
Developing and testing tools for verifying data obtained from CSIs, thereby fostering the integration of such data sources into environmental governance and into the European Open Science Cloud,
Making Citizen-Generated Data (CGD) available as a node in the Green Deal data space,
Directing the need for specific and immediate actions from many citizens and communities by creating synergies between citizen science initiatives and Living Labs for EU missions, partnerships, and other initiatives such as Fab Labs, which share the values of sustainable transition and can help co-design actions within the ecological and digital transformation.

MoRe4nature will ensure implementation and impact beyond the project’s completion by engaging 162 existing CSIs and 98 public authorities and national agencies in 40 cases across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as individual Living Labs and Fab Labs in Europe.

Objectives

General objectives of the project:

Improve the understanding of the dynamics in transformative changes, especially regarding the changing roles of citizens, communities and authorities in monitoring, protecting and improving the environment.
Increase trust in citizen-generated data as complementary to official observations and enabling its validation, sharing, and reuse.
Generate indicators to monitor policy implementation.
Empower citizens and communities by co-designing actions with local authorities to protect their environment in diverse LivingLabs via guidance, tools, and capacity building.
Enable authorities and national agencies to combine authoritative data and citizen science data for monitoring of policy frameworks.

Project Objectives in Ukraine:

To raise public awareness about forest reform;
To engage citizens in identifying illegal logging;
To promote mobile applications for collecting information on the state of the environment;
To assess ecosystem services of forests with different statuses (protected, forestry, municipal);
To monitor logging in protected areas using remote sensing methods.