Diana Zavala-Rojas, a member of the Core Scientific Team of the European Social Survey (ESS) and a senior researcher at the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM-UPF), will be participating in a new project in the framework of the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme that aims to develop a system to systematically measure greenhouse gases in urban areas., Based on the design of a survey, the RECSM researcher will contribute to the study of emissions of these polluting gases and to the understanding of climate change at local level.

Diana Zavala-Rojas will help design an online questionnaire that will collect survey data to measure public opinion on climate change policies at local level

The project ICOS Cities -Towards integrated city observatories for greenhouse gases will provide a new concept for tracking and monitoring greenhouse gas observations. As part of this project, the ESS ERIC, which involves the RECSM, is to develop the methodology to design an online questionnaire that will collect survey data to measure public opinion on city-wide climate change policies.

The survey will be coordinated centrally by members of the ESS Core Scientific Team, from its headquarters at Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) and City, University of London (United Kingdom). As one of the activities planned within the project, Diana Zavala-Rojas, together with the ESS director, Rory Fitzgerald, will give a webinar on 15 December entitled “Survey of attitudes towards climate change and energy preferences in the European Social Survey”.

A project to develop tools to support local climate action plans

The ICOS Cities project, coordinated by ICOS - Integrated Carbon Observation System and funded with 13 million euros by the European Commission, will bring together and evaluate the most innovative approaches to measuring greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas and will develop useful tools and services for cities to support their local climate action plans.

The ESS will plan and implement a longitudinal survey with a gross sample of 2,500 respondents in two of the pilot cities: Paris and Munich

To test the feasibility of different modelling approaches in different areas, three different-sized cities have been selected as pilots: Paris (large), Munich (medium) and Zurich (small). The, the ESS will plan and implement a longitudinal survey with a gross sample of 2,500 respondents in two of the pilot cities: Paris and Munich.

Other European Social Survey (EES) partners involved in various stages of the survey implementation process are the University of Essex (UK), the Norwegian Centre for Research Data, NSD (Norway), the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, GESIS (Germany), and the Sciences Po university of Paris (France).

In addition to providing evidence for the research project, the data collected through these web-based surveys will be made public.

The ESS, the only social science research infrastructure involved

This is the first time that the ESS has participated in a project funded by the European Commission that is led by a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) focusing on the environment.

ESS is the only social science research infrastructure involved in the ICOS Cities project, as part of a consortium of 31 members from different scientific disciplines. The project, which will run for four years, began on 1 October 2021 and is to end on 30 September 2025.

It will become the third active project under the Horizon 2020 programme involving UPF’s ESS, together with the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) and Next Steps in Securing the Sustainability of the European Social Survey (ESS-SUSTAIN-2).