Diana Zavala-Rojas, a member of the European Social Survey (ESS) Core Scientific Team and Senior Research Fellow at the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM)-UPF, will participate in a new Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop a systematic greenhouse gas measurement system for urban areas. The project – ICOS Cities - towards integrated city observatories for greenhouse gases - will provide a concept for monitoring greenhouse gas observations.

The ESS ERIC will develop the methodology for an online questionnaire that will collect survey data measuring public opinion regarding climate change policies at the city level. The survey will be centrally coordinated by members of the ESS core scientific team: ESS Headquarters - based at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and City, University of London (UK). Diana Zavala-Rojas, together with ESS Director Rory Fitzgerald, will deliver a webinar on 15th December entitled “Surveying attitudes towards climate change and energy preferences in the European Social Survey”.

The Pilot Application in Urban Landscapes, coordinated by ICOS - Integrated Carbon Observation System, will bring together and evaluate the most innovative measurement approaches of greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas and will develop useful tools and services for cities to support their local climate action plans.

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

Other partners of the European Social Survey that are involved in different stages of the process of conducting the survey are the University of Essex (UK), the NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data (Norway), GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany) and Sciences Po (France).

As well as providing evidence for the project, the data collected through these web-based surveys will be made publicly available.

It is the first time that the ESS will be involved in an European Commission-funded project that is being led by an environmental focused European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).

ESS is the only social science research infrastructure involved in the ICOS Cities project, as part of a consortium of 31 partners from across scientific disciplines. The four-year project began on October 1st, 2021.

It will become the third active Horizon 2020 project that the ESS at UPF is involved with, alongside the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) and Next Steps in Securing the Sustainability of the European Social Survey (ESS-SUSTAIN-2).