Citizen Observatories for Flood Risk Governance: A Whole of Society Approach

Flooding is a major natural hazard that is becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change and urbanization. Traditional flood management systems often lack sufficient citizen involvement and weak incorporation of local knowledge into risk assessment and response processes. Citizen observatories (COs) have emerged as a transformative solution, incorporating community-based monitoring and crowdsourced data into environmental governance. This work-in-progress paper aims to examine the role of CO in environmental and flood risk governance through a combined scientometric and qualitative analytical approach. The study systematically investigates international policy frameworks that embed participatory governance, maps global CO–integrated flood risk management initiatives, and evaluates the design of European Union CO programmes under FP7, Horizon 2020, and Horizon Europe, with a view toward their contextual adaptation for Nova Scotia, Canada.