IN SITU MONITORING OF WATER QUALITY IN CUBAN BAYS: CREATING AND PROMOTING THE USE OF A SCIENTIFIC TOOLBOX

Degavre, Florence [UCL]

The Havana bay has been considered one of the most polluted bodies of water in the Caribbean. Indeed, the sewage discharge from the city causes eutrophication and oxygen depletion of water bodies leading to drastic consequences for the ecosystem. A less known cause of eutrophication is the presence of suspended low-density microplastics like polyethylene and polypropylene, which may be present at the bay of Havana due to the disintegration of larger plastic pieces dumped into the water. Yet there is no efficient tool available to monitor this kind of pollution in Cuba. This limitation has been explicitly recognized by the Cuban authorities and is intimately related to the national context: the falling of the former socialist block in the early 1990’s and the increased tightening of the US embargo against the country has resulted in a weakening of Cuban science over the last decades. When it comes to monitoring and improving the quality of water in the coastal waters of Cuba, scientists thus face challenges like producing environmentally reliable data (1) and having access to cost-effective measurement devices (2). A further challenge is the lack of a multidisciplinary community (scientific, technical and social) able to tackle the previous challenges, and transfer the knowledge acquired in the process both at the technical and at the social levels (3). Issues 1 and 2 -handled through three specific PhD in this project- are in strong relation with the Sustainable Development Goals and as such, would benefit from the involvement of academia, citizen and entrepreneurs when looking for solutions. Fablabs can provide the synergies between different actors in the ecosystem (Valenzuela-Zubiaur et al., 2021). They show the growing involvement of citizens in the manufacture of objects that were previously the prerogative of (expensive and/or unsustainable) industries. These forms of experimentation are socially innovative insofar as they arise from the needs of actors to share and exchange of technical knowledge, outside the usual patterns of information and knowledge transmission. They are interventions initiated by different stakeholders (users, students etc…) and are the result of collective work whose driving force is “shareability” and free transferability (Eychenne, 2012) prior to marketisation and profit. In Cuba, digital fabrication tools are spreading and the Physics Faculty (University of Havana) is going to be equipped with a digital fabrication facility (fablab-like) which will allow to strongly increase its experimental and fabrication capacities. One goal of the project is to critically expand the digital fabrication facility and to train Cuban Ph.D, MSc. and BSc. students at FabLab ULB with an intensive 5-6 months digital fabrication course. These students will, in turn, be able to train other Cuban people to these techniques. The makers community will be an important connection for sharing knowledge and setting practical aspects of the project in motion. The fablab could also support entrepreneurs through the prototyping of ideas. An important added value is that they will become part of the global fablab community allowing knowledge exchange and know-how concerning digital fabrication. Furthermore, the local community, represented by kids from local schools at the secondary level will be invited to participate in digital fabrication projects related to sea water monitoring, and their activities will be supervised by social scientists and their students, within a truly trans-disciplinary environment. This social appropriation of new technologies is expected to kick off environmental awareness in the community, so they get further engaged in the general project. For fablabs to become places of social innovation and knowledge transfer to develop optimally, it is important to understand under what circumstances a concrete linkage can occur between different actors of the ecosystem. This is why a research effort will be devoted on studying their very functioning. Experiences in Cuba will also be compared with analogous ones taking place in Belgium. In order to tackle the different research questions and challenges described above, we rely on transdisciplinarity as a mode of research that aims to reconcile scientific expertise, drawn from different disciplines, with extra-scientific expertise in the same knowledge production process. Makers, physicists and social scientists will combine their strength with and for non-scientific actors in order to produce a solution to a “wicked” sustainability issue. The expected results are as following: 1. In depth evaluation of the main problems affecting the environmental monitoring of Cuban bays. 2. Creative approach for the adaptation of frugal solutions to actual problems. 3. Two-way corridor between academic labs and real scenarios –“touching-the-problem” approach. 4. Synergies between academic scientists, local communities and local entrepreneurs. 5. Enhanced effective coordination between local and international partners. 6. Enhanced social innovation and environmental awareness at the local community level.