Empowering and Engaging Communities: Citizen Science on Climate Change Awareness

Climate change is considered by many to be the most daunting issue that has confronted the human race.For the more than 20,000 families hardly hit and devastated by tropical storm Washi in 2011, this disastrous influence of climate change destroyed victims' physical life, and worse intensified their sufferings due to loss of loved ones, the threat to life, loss of property and valuable resources.This study is part of the University's Climate Change Project aimed to empower the typhoon survivors using the Climate Change Module as its initial vehicle for community organizing.It used Citizen Science as an approach and a discipline, believing that most citizen science projects have underlying, testable assumptions that engaging the public in the process of research has scientific, educational, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes.Thus this study aimed to increase the survivors' climate change awareness to ease the victims' level of anxiety about climate change and to enhance their emotional coping capacities by increasing their knowledge, developing positive attitude and behavior on climate change.Results show that there were significant increases in their knowledge, attitude and potential behaviors regarding climate change.