Ecology

Neuroscience

Biology

Social psychology

Botany

Anthropology

Environmental planning

Climate change

Psychology

Politics

Geography

Political science

Participatory GIS

Democracy

Environmental resource management

Citizen journalism

Sociology

Environmental science

Citizen science

Cognitive reframing

Participatory action research

Adaptation (eye)

Climate science

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

The article presents results of a research project aiming to develop theoretical and empirical contributions on participatory approaches and methods of citizen science for risk mapping and adaptation to climate change. In the first part, the paper presents a review of the literature on key concepts and perspectives related to participatory citizen science, introducing the concept of the “right to research”. It highlights the mutual fertilization with participatory mapping methods to deal with disaster situations associated to climate change. In the second part, the paper describes and presents the results and conclusions of an action-research developed on the coastline between the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2017–2018. It involved affected communities as protagonists in mapping and managing risks of natural disasters caused by extreme climate events, by combining citizen science approaches and methods with Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) and social cartography. The article concludes by pointing out the contributions and limits of the “right to research” as a relevant Social Science approach to reframe citizen science from a democratic view.

Citizen science and the right to research: building local knowledge of climate change impacts