One way to ensure effective, positive, long-term partnership is by engaging people from outside professional organizations in different aspects of disaster risk reduction projects, including the co-creation of research projects, data collection and data interpretation. One group it is important to engage with is the general public, with 'citizen science' being one way of structuring a partnership.

Watch this short video that introduces citizen science.

Participatory practices such as citizen science are not only useful approaches for collecting and analyzing data but also play a vital role in the rapid generation and sharing of information. 

As you will examine in Module 5 (Information Access), the lack of access to hazard information increases the risk of a misunderstanding of what science can do and even in some cases, a public denial of science. By considering the public as partners, scientist start to engage them as actors who contribute to and shape disaster risk reduction activities, and not as passive recipients of information.