The I-CHANGE Environmental Impact Hub (EIH)

The I-CHANGE (Individual Change of HAbits Needed for Green European transition) project is a 3.5-year Innovation Action initiative, funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, concluding in April 2025. It aims to engage citizens actively in environmental monitoring and climate action, demonstrating that individual behavioral changes, facilitated through citizen science initiatives utilizing sensors and monitoring devices, can significantly reduce environmental footprints. The project establishes Living Labs (LLs) as collaborative spaces where researchers and communities engage in scientific discourse, sharing insights and outcomes. Central to I-CHANGE is the Environmental Impact Hub (EIH), a comprehensive data infrastructure designed to collect data, provide tools, and support initiatives facilitating citizens to participate in environmental monitoring and action. The EIH is a data hub that effectively shares, manages, and processes diverse datasets, ensuring interoperability and usability of heterogeneous data. It supports machine-to-machine interactions to facilitate the development of desktop and mobile applications through dedicated service interfaces and APIs. The EIH is built of discrete components, including the Data and Information Broker - based on the pre-existing Discovery and Access Broker (DAB) - which facilitates seamless discovery and access to diverse data sources, including in-situ measurements, citizen-provided data, and European infrastructures; the Citizen Observatory Archive which ingests, quality-checks, and stores observations generated by the LLs; the Dashboard which supports visualization of environmental data and empowers citizens to monitor and understand their environmental impact with intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, near real-time analytics, and actionable insights, enabling users to explore the environmental consequences of their actions and track improvements over time. The EIH offers multiple interfaces to support a wide range of use cases and interaction types. These include geospatial interfaces adhering to standards (such as those from OGC and ISO), a Web API for easy web development integration, and a RESTful API for exchanging JSON data across various platforms. I-CHANGE is predicated on the belief that citizens and civil society play a central role in environmental protection and climate action. As direct involvement of private citizens is considered essential to drive meaningful shifts towards more sustainable behavior, I-CHANGE presents a comprehensive effort to engage citizens in environmental monitoring and action, by providing both advanced technological platforms and participatory Living Labs. The EIH supports this vision by providing the underpinning technical infrastructure. By facilitating access to diverse data and tools, and promoting citizen involvement, I-CHANGE aims to empower individuals to make informed decisions that contribute to environmental sustainability, mitigating environmental challenges, and advancing climate action.