Ambole Amollo, Anditi Christer, Oni Tolu
Design Department, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.
University of Cambridge, MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
PLOS Glob Public Health. 2025 May 7;5(5):e0003958. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0003958. eCollection 2025.
Planetary health has emerged as a transdisciplinary field to capture the interdependencies between environmental changes and human health. Nowhere is this more critical than in the low- and middle-income country (LMIC) settings where the majority of the world's population live. These settings are undergoing rapid urbanisation that could further threaten planetary boundaries. The collaborative and societally engaged nature of planetary health means more participatory and dynamic methods are needed to better characterise these exposures. Citizen science has the potential to enable the co-production of community-relevant evidence but the extent to which this is being deployed for planetary health in LMIC cities has not been synthesised. To synthesise evidence on the use of citizen science for planetary health-relevant studies in urban LMIC settings, we conducted a scoping review, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews and Joanna Briggs Institute's stages of conducting a scoping review. Inclusion criteria included empirical studies in LMICs, with a focus on cities and published in English within the last 10 years. Of the 31 eligible studies included, the majority focused on biodiversity, illustrating the unharnessed potential of deploying citizen science to advance understanding of a broader range of planetary health variables in LMIC cities. Our finding of a predominance of Global North funding for these studies highlights the need for greater diversity of funding sources and for a shift in the centre of gravity of funding decisions to optimise alignment of research priorities with contextual realities in the Global South. To inform future research, we propose a standardised reporting format for citizen science planetary health projects and guidelines to optimise data reliability and validity.
行星健康已成为一个跨学科领域，用于揭示环境变化与人类健康之间的相互依存关系。这一点在世界上大多数人口居住的低收入和中等收入国家（LMIC）背景下尤为关键。这些地区正在经历快速城市化，这可能会进一步威胁地球边界。行星健康的协作性和社会参与性意味着需要更具参与性和动态性的方法来更好地描述这些暴露情况。公民科学有潜力促进与社区相关的证据的共同生产，但在LMIC城市中，公民科学在行星健康方面的应用程度尚未得到综合评估。为了综合关于公民科学在LMIC城市环境中用于与行星健康相关研究的证据，我们按照系统评价和Meta分析扩展的首选报告项目以及乔安娜·布里格斯研究所进行范围审查的阶段，进行了一次范围审查。纳入标准包括在LMIC进行的实证研究，重点是城市，且在过去10年内以英文发表。在纳入的31项符合条件的研究中，大多数关注生物多样性，这表明在LMIC城市中利用公民科学来增进对更广泛的行星健康变量的理解方面，存在尚未开发的潜力。我们发现这些研究主要由全球北方提供资金，这凸显了资金来源需要更加多样化，以及资金决策重心需要转移，以优化研究重点与全球南方背景现实的契合度。为指导未来的研究，我们提出了公民科学行星健康项目的标准化报告格式以及优化数据可靠性和有效性的指南。
