Johanna Varner, an associate professor of biology, has been invited to attend the event as a delegate for the Citizen Science Global Partnership, which she said is advocating for the use of citizen/participatory science as a tool for achieving U.N. sustainable development goals.

“The goal is also to sort of drum up some support, either financial support or in-kind support, for some of these global environmental monitoring programs that engage the public,” she said.

She is one of five people selected as a delegate for the American Association of Participatory Sciences, which is part of the Citizen Science Global Partnership consortium.

Varner said she was selected as a result of her work with pikas and a citizen science pika app, and her involvement with the CMU-led, international team that last year won the XPRIZE Rainforest competition. That event challenged teams to develop ways to use various technologies and methods to rapidly assess biodiversity in rainforests.

Varner said the last U.N. Environmental Assembly two years ago was attended by more than 7,000 delegates from 182 member states.

“I think it’s exciting to be a part of this thing at a really big, global scale and I also think that just attending this assembly is going to be a really interesting opportunity for me to learn more about global environmental governance, which is something that I can bring back and share with my students at CMU and with the CMU community,” she said.

Varner said a CMU faculty professional development award is covering most of the cost for her to attend.

Varner has a long involvement with citizen science tied to her work researching pikas, small relatives of rabbits found in alpine environments. She was involved in starting a citizen science project in the Columbia River Gorge/Mount Hood region around 2011, somewhat stemming from her Ph.D. research there. The project took a hit due to the pandemic, but she has worked with the Oregon Zoo to revive it.

What is called the Cascades Pika Watch “has been very, very successful. This past year we had over 650 trained volunteers who collected many, many hundreds of surveys across our study area,” Varner said.

Varner also has worked in collaboration with the Colorado Pika Project to develop an app that lets people with mobile devices in the western North American mountains report pika sightings and related information. She said the Pika Patrol app has more than 600 users who have created profiles and submitted observations, and many more have downloaded the app.

She said that while the winning XPRIZE team didn’t have a citizen science component, she thinks one reason it contributed to her being selected as a delegate is that it involved collaborating with indigenous communities to tap some of their ecological knowledge and help the world value that knowledge.

The Citizen Science Global Partnership is planning a number of initiatives at the assembly. One will involve having delegation members carry air quality monitors they can pin on clothing, purses, etc., and collect data as they move around Nairobi, which she said has a lot of traffic and air pollution. The idea is to show how small, inexpensive, portable devices can be used to collect a lot of fine-scale data that policymakers can use to address air quality, such as through changing traffic patterns and enhancing public transit, she said.

Varner’s group also plans to make use of the iNaturalist app in a bioblitz project aimed at engaging delegates in Nairobi to spend some of their time there documenting plants and animals they encounter. She said the idea is to demonstrate the scale and power of citizen science in gathering biodiversity data.

Varner, who wrote the report submitted by the XPRIZE team ahead of its victory, also will be involved in a report-writing team for a climate change mitigation project the Citizen Science Global Partnership will be proposing. She said the plan is focused on a platform for helping people determine their carbon footprint and compare it to that of others around the world. Varner said while it can be a lot of work for people to collect that data, a lot of it is on their phones, and that data collection could be automated to provide people information on their carbon footprint and how they could lower it in ways that minimize disruptions to their activities and save them money.

She said the individual-actions sector is one of the sectors that have seen the slowest movement in terms of addressing carbon emissions. The goal is to help people understand emissions associated with choices they make about things such as traveling, eating and consuming energy at home, and consider actions to reduce those emissions.

“It’s nontrivial to try to make this something that is functional for people all over the world,” she said.

Varner has seen first-hand how climate change affects the pikas she studies and their habitats. As she heads to the U.N. Environmental Assembly, which will be focusing on a range of environmental issues including climate change, she is going at a time when the Trump administration is dismissing climate change as a threat and aggressively pushing for more fossil fuels development.

“I think one thing about that that’s clear is that the rest of the world is moving forward on this issue,” Varner said.

She said that’s something that came up a lot earlier this year at an event that she and CMU biology professor Tom Walla, the leader of the winning XPRIZE team, attended in London. The Terra Carta Roundtables & Exhibition attracted industry CEOs and government leaders from around the world and focused on setting out the economic case for a sustainable future. The Sustainable Markets Initiative, founded by King Charles III, whom Varner and Walla had the opportunity to meet during the event, was involved in putting on the event.

“Basically the global conversation was that the rest of the world is moving forward on trying to solve these problems and they would love to have the United States on board but they’re not going to stop because we’re not really actively trying to be part of those conversations at this time,” she said.

Asked whether a decade ago she would have envisioned being so involved in science at an international level, Varner said with a laugh, “No, it’s definitely been a wild year. I mean, I think 10 years ago I would have thought it was pretty wild just to be involved in a couple of pika projects in a couple of different states.”

One thing has led to another for Varner, who mused, “the more meaningful things that you get involved with, the more meaningful opportunities present themselves.”

She said she hopes her experiences provide a good example for students “that people from Grand Junction have a place at the global table and we have the opportunity to contribute to some of this policy at a really high level.”

She added, “I think there’s a teaching point there, too, that you never know where life will take you, but by being open to new opportunities sometimes it takes you to some pretty cool places.”