‘Citizen scientists’ share observations in challenge

IOI Properties Group (IOIPG) organised its own version of the City Nature Challenge (CNC) across its developments in Malaysia, Singapore and Xiamen, China.

The CNC is an annual global community science competition to document urban biodiversity.

The IOIPG City Nature Challenge 2022 was a collaboration with local environmental organisations coordinating the CNC, namely Sekitar Kita, Water Warriors of Universiti Malaya and Iskandar Malaysia CNC.

The challenge aimed to achieve IOIPG’s goal of caring for the environment, by helping to create sustainable communities that care for nature.

“IOIPG has been participating in the CNC since 2019,” said IOIPG Group corporate communication and sustainability general manager Kristine Ng.

“In 2021, the group organised its maiden IOIPG CNC to encourage participation of customers, residents and employees.

“As we move towards the endemic phase (of Covid-19), IOIPG CNC 2022 features safe and family-friendly activities, which began with a virtual webinar to raise awareness of how the public can play a role in collecting urban biodiversity data for scientific research,” she added.

During the IOIPG event, participants – called “citizen scientists” – received a digital sharing toolkit containing information on the competition and took part in a social media blitz to contribute towards “citizen science” by making and uploading their observations on the iNaturalist website or app.

In this year’s competition, IOIPG managed to record 2,794 observations and identified 910 species of flora and fauna across Malaysia, Singapore and Xiamen.

The IOIPG CNC webinar drew 320 participants as well as more than 230 observers and identifiers.

Including data collected from the previous year, IOIPG has so far recorded 6,123 observations and identified 1,641 species of flora and fauna across its developments in Malaysia, Singapore and China.

Cities around the world compete in CNC to make the most observations of outdoor urban plants and wildlife, using the iNaturalist app, with the purpose of connecting people to nature and generating scientifically valuable biodiversity data.

IOIPG’s version of the CNC is in line with the group’s mission to safeguard the environment and in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, namely quality education, sustainable cities and communities, life on land as well as partnership for the goals.