Transdisciplinary interventions for environmental sustainability.

This paper presents a case study of a transdisciplinary research based on an ex-post assessment of the environmental and socio-behavioral contexts of solid waste management in Lebanese peri-urban communities. Lessons learned are compiled into the Transdisciplinary Interventions for Environmental Sustainability conceptual framework. The approach starts with building a team of researchers and non-academic partners, continues with co-creating solution-oriented knowledge, and ends by integrating and applying the produced knowledge. The co-created knowledge includes the environmental and socio-behavioral ex-post assessment's results. The former reveals low air pollution levels, evidence of waste-related water contamination, and higher self-reported frequencies of ill-health symptoms and diseases closer to the landfill. The latter indicates that the community's perception about waste production differs from the real accounting of generated waste. Nine lessons are identified: (1) inherent common interest between the researchers and the community, (2) flexible interdisciplinary research team, (3) representative citizen committee, (4) contextually-informed outreach coordinator, (5) iterative research process accounting for the shifting socio-political context, (6) common expectations of the research process, (7) boundary objects leading to spin-off activities in the same setting, (8) effective communication strategy, and (9) ex-post assessment of subsequent societal and scientific impacts. The non-phased framework links all nine pointers in a logical order to ease scalability. The study answers a global need for a unified, clear, broadly adopted framework for transdisciplinarity and a deeper understanding of factors ensuring full-circle knowledge co-creation in waste-related contexts in the global South. The study offers managerial and research implications and suggests avenues for further research.

Citizen science in Lebanon-a case study for groundwater quality monitoring.

Over the past decade, several citizen science projects have been launched, with a smaller subset addressing citizen scientists' involvement in water quality monitoring. Most of these projects were conducted in developed countries and focused on qualitative assessment and measurements of a limited number of water quality parameters. Moreover, data generated by citizen scientists were mainly for monitoring purposes and rarely resulted in remedial measures. In this work, a collaborative citizen science approach involving local citizens and university researchers was applied to assess the groundwater quality in a Lebanese village. Using a mobile laboratory, winter and summer sampling campaigns were conducted and 12 physical, chemical and biological water quality parameters were tested. Results indicated that the data generated by the citizen scientists were comparable with those generated by university researchers for the majority of physical and chemical water quality parameters. However, the bacteriological test results showed a marked difference and may be attributed to the complexity of the testing procedure and quality of testing material. The collaborative and participatory approach resulted in building local capacity and knowledge and in the formation of a locally elected water committee which will be responsible for continuous monitoring of the groundwater resources.