Abstract:

The Dive & Breath Data project (D&B Data) is part of the Madrid Deep Demonstration (MDD) portfolio. It promotes the participatory innovation of young people, with great potential links with the neighborhood and the day-to-day local ecosystem. D&B Data project incorporates experiential learning to guide young people in the collective design and implementation of a network of the environmental quality sensors of their neighborhood (air and river water), as well as nature-based solutions (NbS) for the greening of playgrounds, classrooms, and the neighborhood surroundings.

D&B Data was born in 2020 within the framework of the Young Innovators program of the EIT Climate-KIC, with a high impact on the lowest Spanish economic income area (San Cristobal neighborhood), located in the south of Madrid, and provides a high potential for scalability to other depressed areas. A major objective of this project is to promote citizen science, the understanding of the reality behind each tool, promote critical thinking in young innovators, and encourage them to actively propose solutions.

The process of the project begins with training sessions for teachers and is applied with some pilot groups of students, students who later, based on their experience and learning, teach other students, promoting the construction and monitoring of sensors for air quality and water. In addition to the construction of these sensors, the critical analysis of the data is promoted from a quantitative and qualitative approach, which ends with the call to action, turning them into agents of transformation, through the collection of samples and data in the surroundings of the schools.

This same mission of environmental awareness has been carried out in the second module (during the second year of the project in 2021), using solutions based on nature, which have combined the use of recycled materials, such as broken and abandoned school furniture, bags and reused plastics and plants from municipal nurseries in Madrid. As a link between the first module of air and water quality sensors, and the second module of nature-based solutions, the students assembled the sensors in mini-portable measurement stations and verified the environmental benefit provided by the nature-based solutions, that they themselves had proposed and designed. This way, an attempt has been made to maintain the focus on the training of young people, as climate leaders, using technological tools that allow the development of creative and innovative solutions to the most immediate environmental challenges. The program has managed to adapt new formats in relation to the contents of module 1 and develop new modules focused on the use of vegetation to fight against climate change, testing nature-based solutions in the educational centers themselves. The activity carried out during the year 2021 has reached 122 students and 19 teachers. This is a reach three times higher than in 2020 and it will be increased, at least, 10% in 2022 with five new schools.

In addition, the project has been able to nurture and contribute to the educational portfolio of the MDD in the city of Madrid and build new alliances with initiatives such as VegetArt-ing, and Climate Innovation Leadership Program (CIL), collecting new contributions to improve the proposal.

The results of the surveys to teachers and students enrolled in the program were satisfactory and their suggestions have been included in the third edition of D&B Data in 2022

Keywords:

Water pollution, air pollution, service-learning, climate change, biomonitoring, urban trees, air pollutants, environmental pollution.