Summary

Download the report

Summary

By surveying over 22,000 young adults across 23 countries, we found substantial variations in individuals’ psychological and physical connections to nature. These differences were explained by country-scale factors such as socioeconomic conditions, cropped land cover, and biodiversity levels. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering country-specific contexts when evaluating people’s connection to nature and devising effective enhancement strategies.

Download the report

Summary

Biodiversity renewal activities are causing major changes to landscapes and ecological assemblages in some areas. Initiatives are inherently intertwined with local people and communities, who can be drivers, inhibitors and beneficiaries of renewal efforts. It is therefore critical to understand how biodiversity renewal impacts people’s pro-nature attitudes and behaviours, health and well-being…

Download the report

Summary

Nature recovery requires the provisioning of resources in the right place and in sufficient quantities to support wildlife populations and improve ecological processes. Agri-environment schemes (AES) have been a major mechanism for delivering environmental management across EU farmed landscapes, but measured benefits to nature are often negligible in large part due to a lack of strategic spatial targeting of management actions. As an example, AES in England is often delivered using a participatory strategy, typically at an individual farm scale, with types of management agreements and uptake reflecting the business model and interests of each farm. However, this implementation model can result in poorly distributed conservation resources and, consequently, a failure to recover nature across larger scales, even if individual agreements are delivered well. Achieving effective, large-scale nature recovery through AES requires aligning its implementation with spatially targeted approaches that prioritise specific conservation goals. We discuss the rationale for, and major barriers to, aligning AES design and implementation to these approaches. We then highlight how, through the framework of systematic conservation planning, both the strategic and participatory components of AES could be aligned better to enhance nature recovery outcomes. To ensure AES helps achieve nature recovery goals, clear and measurable targets must be set with the type and spatial configuration of actions designed to enable meeting targets. Strategic spatial targeting must also be carried out with the implementation phase in mind, accounting for socio-economic opportunities and barriers to engagement and acknowledging that uncertainties around farm-scale implementation mean plans must be adaptable. Participatory approaches for AES design and implementation that support the delivery of spatially targeted management actions are required, most notably by facilitating collaboration or cooperation across farm holdings. For AES to contribute effectively to nature recovery goals, aligning strategic and participatory approaches in its design and implementation is crucial. This requires uniting knowledge across disciplines and cultures and ensuring that information is shared to support progressive refinement of scheme design and guidance towards achieving overall nature recovery goals.

Download the report (Coming soon)

Summary

Fieldwork-based research and education in ecology are under multiple threats and are progressively declining. We call for greater attention to this ongoing loss of direct field experience within the ecology community, as it could have widespread consequences for science and education, ultimately hindering efforts to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis.

Download the report

Summary

As environmental degradation continues at local, regional, and global levels, people’s accepted norms for natural environmental conditions are likely to decline. This phenomenon, known as shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), is increasingly recognized as a likely major obstacle to addressing global environmental challenges. However, the prevalence of SBS remains uncertain. We conducted an exten- sive systematic review, synthesizing existing research on people’s perceived environmental baselines. Our analysis, based on 73 case studies, suggests that SBS is a widespread global phenomenon, occurring across diverse socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural settings. We observed that younger individuals tend to hold lower environmental baselines across various environmental contexts, including climate change, natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and pollution. An upward shift in perceived environmental baselines among younger generations was rarely observed. These results underscore the challenge that SBS poses when policy and management responses to environmental degradation are influenced by perceived natural environmental norms.

Download the report

Summary

People have unique sets of direct sensory interactions with wild species, which change through their days, weeks, seasons, and lifetimes. Despite having important influences on their health and well-being and their attitudes towards nature, these personalized ecologies remain surprisingly little studied and are poorly understood. However, much can be inferred about personalized ecologies by considering them from first principles (largely macroecological), alongside insights from research into the design and effectiveness of biodiversity monitoring programmes, knowledge of how animals respond to people, and studies of human biology and demography. Here I first review how three major sets of drivers, opportunity, capability and motivation, shape people’s personalized ecologies. Second, I then explore the implications of these mechanisms for how more passively and more actively practical improvements can be made in people’s personalized ecologies. Particularly in light of the declines in the richness of these ecologies that are being experienced in much of the world (the so-called ‘extinction of experience’), and the significant consequences, marked improvement in many people’s interactions and experiences with nature may be key to the future of biodiversity.

Download the report

Summary

Addressing the global environmental problems facing our planet requires a significant shift in human behaviour. Personal experiences with nature are suggested to be a key driver of pro-environmental behaviour. However, the validity of this idea is uncertain. Using a systematic literature review and meta-analysis, we show that direct experiences of nature are positively associated with a wide range of positive actions towards the natural environment, including recycling, energy conservation, green purchasing, and participating in conservation volunteering. Nature experiences were more strongly linked to ‘pro-biodiversity’ behaviours (actions that specifically focussed on wildlife and habitat conservation) than other general pro-environmental behaviours, although the difference was statistically marginal. There was no difference in the strength of the association with proenvironmental behaviour between nature experiences during childhood and those during other times in life. Adjustment for publication bias did not produce significantly different results. While highlighting a need for experimental or longitudinal study designs in this area, our results suggest that enhancing people’s engagement with nature can be a valuable strategy for promoting behaviour change that helps address global environmental issues.

Download the report

Summary

What propelled the human ‘revolutions’ that started the Anthropocene? and what could speed humanity out of trouble? Here, we focus on the role of reinforcing feedback cycles, often comprised of diverse, unrelated elements(e.g. fire, grass, humans), in propelling abrupt and/or irreversible, revolutionary changes. We suggest that differential ‘spread of the cycles’ has been critical to the past human revolutions of fire use, agriculture, rise of complex states and industrialization. For each revolution, we review and map out proposed reinforcing feedback cycles, and describe how new systems built on previous ones, propelling us into the Anthropocene. We argue that to escape a bleak Anthropocene will require abruptly shifting from existing unsustainable ‘vicious cycles’, to alternative sustainable ‘virtuous cycles’ that can outspread and out persist them. This will need to be complemented by a revolutionary cultural shift from maximizing growth to maximizing persistence (sustainability). To achieve that we suggest that non-human elements need to be brought back into the feedback cycles underlying human cultures and associated measures of progress.

Download the report

Summary

Spatial sampling bias (SSB) is a feature of opportunistically sampled species records. Species distribution models (SDMs) built using these data (i.e. presence-background models) can produce biased predictions of suitability across geographic space, confounding species occurrence with the distribution of sampling effort. A wide range of SSB correction methods have been developed but simulations suggest effects on predictive performance are highly variable. Here, we aim to identify the SSB correction methods that have the highest likelihood of improving true predictive performance and evaluation strategies that provide a reliable indicator of model performance when independent test data are unavailable.

Download the report

Summary

Protected areas (PAs) are a core component in global efforts to prevent further declines in biodiversity. We examine whether the United Kingdom’s PA portfolio has reduced local extinctions of breeding birds and consider how the characteristics of different PA designations may have affected conservation outcomes. We use breeding bird atlas data to calculate the proportion of species in each 10 × 10-km grid cell confirmed as breeding in 1988–1991 but not in 2008–2011. We find that the protection offered by PAs is little to no different from that of the wider landscape and, depending on the type of PA, attribute this to PAs being either too small or not managed for biodiversity outcomes. To meet the ambitious new global targets for expanding PA coverage set at the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference, all countries need to monitor and ensure PA effectiveness; high PA coverage does not guarantee that biodiversity is protected.

Download the report

Summary

The future of biodiversity lies not just in the strategies and mechanisms by which ecosystems and species are practically best protected from anthropogenic pressures. It lies also, and perhaps foremost, in the many billions of decisions that people make that, intentionally or otherwise, shape their impact on nature and
the conservation policies and interventions that are implemented. Personalised ecology – the set of direct sensory interactions that each of us has with nature – is one important consideration in understanding the decisions that people make. Indeed, it has long been argued that people’s personalised ecologies have powerful implications, as captured in such concepts as biophilia, extinction of experience, and shifting baselines. In this paper we briefly review the connections between personalised ecology and the future of biodiversity, and the ways in which personalised ecologies might usefully be enhanced to improve that future.

Gaston, K.J., Phillips, B.B. & Soga, M. 2023. Personalised ecology and the future of biodiversity. Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, in press.

Download the report

Summary

People can express irrational fears and disgust responses towards certain wild organisms. This so-called ‘biophobia’ can be useful and indeed necessary in some circumstances. Biophobia can, however, also lead to excessive distress and anxiety which, in turn, can result in people avoiding interactions with nature. Here, we highlight concern that this reduction in interactions with nature might lead to progressive increases in biophobia, entrenching it more in individuals and across society. We propose the ‘vicious cycle of biophobia’, a concept that encapsulates how excessive aversion towards nature might emerge and grow in society. The vicious cycle of biophobia risks accelerating the extinction of experience, leading to  long-term adverse consequences for the conservation of biodiversity.

Soga, M., Gaston, K.J., Fukano, Y. and Evans, M.J. (2023). The vicious cycle of biophobia. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.12.012.

Download the report

Summary

Human activities are damaging the world’s ecosystems, posing a serious threat to life on Earth, including humanity. To address this situation, widespread and sig-nificant changes in human behaviour are necessary. Direct experiences of nature can encourage individuals to adopt positive actions towards biodiversity (here-after pro-biodiversity behaviour), but this relationship has not been well studied. Using a large sample of Japanese adults, we demonstrate that both recent and childhood frequencies of nature experiences are associated with an increased likelihood of exhibiting pro-biodiversity behaviours. This association was found to be consistent across various forms of behaviour, including purchasing eco-friendly products, reducing pesticide use in domestic gardens, and donating to conservation organizations. However, our research also reveals a declining trend of childhood experiences of nature in Japan, resulting in an “extinction of experience.” Our results suggest that enhancing people’s personal experiences with nature could help promote desired behavioural change to halt biodiversity loss

Download the report

CBI Foreword

In the past decade, a seismic shift has taken place in the global political economy. Protecting our planet has become a key priority for governments and businesses across every country and, while it can be argued that this step change has come much too late, it is nonetheless encouraging to see this issue is increasingly central to business strategy. So far, this has primarily involved a focus on decarbonisation in line with the Paris Agreement and the 2030 net zero targets for the UK, however, we continue to learn more and more about the other ways we need to protect our planet…

Download the report

Summary

The human health benefits of direct sensory interactions with nature (hereafter direct human–nature interactions) are increasingly recognised. However, these interactions can also have various negative health and well-being impacts on people, some of which may be severe. Compared to positive ones, there have been relatively little investigation of such negative direct human–nature interactions beyond the medical literature, and what has been done is widely scattered across disciplines…

Soga, M. and Gaston, K.J. (2022). The dark side of nature experience: Typology, dynamics and implications of negative sensory interactions with nature. People and Nature.

Download the report