Periodic Reporting for period 4 - RELATE (Environmental Spaces and the Feel-Good Factor: Relating Subjective Wellbeing to Biodiversity)
Période du rapport: 2022-04-01 au 2023-05-31
The purpose of RELATE was to initiate a step-change in our understanding of how nature underpins human wellbeing in a time of profound environmental change. Global phenomena, such as urbanisation, agricultural intensification and biotic homogenisation, have led to extensive ecosystem degradation and species extinctions, and, as a result, a reduction in biodiversity. Yet, while it is now widely asserted in the research, policy and practice arenas that interacting with nature is fundamental to human wellbeing, there is a worrying paucity of nuanced evidence characterising how the living components of nature, biodiversity, play a role in this accepted truth. We need to understand this if we are to manage our natural environment effectively, to benefit both biodiversity conservation and public health.
RELATE was founded on the use of cutting-edge mixed methods. Indeed, the entire premise of the project was interdisciplinary, integrating ecology, human geography, environmental psychology and economics. Up until when RELATE started, much of the research on human-nature relationships has been primarily initiated within specific disciplines, with very little cross-disciplinary work conducted to meaningfully address both the social and ecological intricacies of human-nature relationships.
With RELATE, I pioneered and established a completely new approach to investigating this challenging and important problem, innovating within this genuinely interdisciplinary space. During the course of the project, the team worked with ~10,000 members of the British public. This involved sectors of society often underrepresented in research, such as the elderly, ethnic minorities, and people from lower-income households. We tackled the following three objectives: (1) explore how people relate to different biodiversity attributes, both positively and negatively, across all classes of cultural ecosystem services and types of human-nature experience; (2) quantify variation in how people value, or not, different biodiversity attributes using a range of monetary and non-monetary valuation techniques; and (3) understand how co-occurrence between biodiversity and people may change across space and time, and the impact this may have on human-biodiversity relationships.
RELATE was founded on the use of cutting-edge mixed methods. Indeed, the entire premise of the project was interdisciplinary, integrating ecology, human geography, environmental psychology and economics. Up until when RELATE started, much of the research on human-nature relationships has been primarily initiated within specific disciplines, with very little cross-disciplinary work conducted to meaningfully address both the social and ecological intricacies of human-nature relationships.
With RELATE, I pioneered and established a completely new approach to investigating this challenging and important problem, innovating within this genuinely interdisciplinary space. During the course of the project, the team worked with ~10,000 members of the British public. This involved sectors of society often underrepresented in research, such as the elderly, ethnic minorities, and people from lower-income households. We tackled the following three objectives: (1) explore how people relate to different biodiversity attributes, both positively and negatively, across all classes of cultural ecosystem services and types of human-nature experience; (2) quantify variation in how people value, or not, different biodiversity attributes using a range of monetary and non-monetary valuation techniques; and (3) understand how co-occurrence between biodiversity and people may change across space and time, and the impact this may have on human-biodiversity relationships.
By the end of RELATE, the team had published a total of 27 publications, comprising one co-edited book; five book chapters; and 21 peer-reviewed journal papers. Another 10 peer-reviewed journal papers are currently under review or due for submission immediately. Many of our published papers are in high-impact, multidisciplinary journals such as Nature Sustainability, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Environmental Research and Science of the Total Environment. The research team has also organised four successful conferences (Making a Difference in Conservation: Improving the Links between Ecological Research, Policy and Practice; The Multiple Values of Nature; Securing the Natural Environment for Future Generations; Trees for Climate Change, Biodiversity and People), always ensuring that the delegates were a mix of individuals from policy, practice and academic communities. All three events reached maximum delegate capacity, with 150, 150, 200, 200 participants respectively. We have also run webinars and had meetings with potential end-users of RELATE research, as well as presenting our work at conferences and giving various keynote or invited seminar presentations. We have participated/organised a diverse variety of public engagement activities too. For example, the team have designed an ‘ideal woodland’ game and other tasks for the public attending Glastonbury music festival, co-organised and run Soapbox Science in Canterbury to promote women in STEM research, co-organised and run a local BioBlitz and given public lectures to a variety of different audiences. We are also finalising a non-academic graphic novel, which is a highly original and captivating way of communicating research findings from the participatory workshops we ran with the public towards the beginning of the project.
Objective 1. This objective has been tackled through systematic reviews of the existing literature and a series of four participatory workshops. The systematic reviews have incorporated a wealth of both qualitative and quantitative evidence. The systematic reviews evolved into a much large endeavour than originally envisaged, covering both blue and green environmental spaces, and many additional academic expert partners across Europe. The findings were co-produced into a policy brief with World Health Organisation. The workshops generated particularly extensive, rich and top-quality datasets, with the quantitative and qualitative information offering an extensive interpretative account of the diverse ways people relate to, experience and culturally construct biodiversity attributes in the context of their wellbeing.
Objective 2. This objective was tackled through a diverse array of mixed methods, including the participatory workshops mentioned above. Additionally, we have developed and validated BIO-WELL, a new self-reported human wellbeing psychometric scale. There has been considerable interest in the development and application of the scale from across the policy and practice communities, from both conservation and public health perspectives. Consequently, we have developed an R package and shinyapp to support the use and interpretation of BIO-WELL by end-users. BIO-WELL has also been translated into 30 languages. We also undertook a comprehensive interrogation of the environmental economics literature to examine long-term temporal shifts in the monetary values people place on biodiversity. Although a diversity of cultural ecosystem services and forest types have been studied over the years, the existing evidence-base is biased towards high-income countries and recreational forest use. Finally, we used national-scale questionnaires, involving >7000 participants, to quantify people’s values for biodiversity attributes, bring together BIO-WELL and choice experiments (a methodological technique from environmental economics).
Objective 3. This objective was tackled through the approaches already mentioned above. From a temporal perspective, we particularly focused on seasonality. We have innovated methodologically by using the participatory workshops to inform the choice of attributes and levels that were used in seasonal choice experiments; normally, the attributes and levels are decided by experts/researchers. By combining our monetary (choice experiments) and non-monetary valuation (BIO-WELL) methods, we found that people’s willingness-to-pay for local forest creation is influenced by the wellbeing (measured via BIO-WELL) that participants get from existing forests. This is a particularly important message for policy/practice decision-makers. Finally, we have explored how species and/or traits (e.g. textures, smells) that elicit human wellbeing responses vary spatially and seasonally across Britain (the RELATE study system). High ‘quality’ forests (those that have the most species traits that support human wellbeing) are unequally distributed, with individuals living in more deprived areas generally having lower quality forest nearby.
Objective 1. This objective has been tackled through systematic reviews of the existing literature and a series of four participatory workshops. The systematic reviews have incorporated a wealth of both qualitative and quantitative evidence. The systematic reviews evolved into a much large endeavour than originally envisaged, covering both blue and green environmental spaces, and many additional academic expert partners across Europe. The findings were co-produced into a policy brief with World Health Organisation. The workshops generated particularly extensive, rich and top-quality datasets, with the quantitative and qualitative information offering an extensive interpretative account of the diverse ways people relate to, experience and culturally construct biodiversity attributes in the context of their wellbeing.
Objective 2. This objective was tackled through a diverse array of mixed methods, including the participatory workshops mentioned above. Additionally, we have developed and validated BIO-WELL, a new self-reported human wellbeing psychometric scale. There has been considerable interest in the development and application of the scale from across the policy and practice communities, from both conservation and public health perspectives. Consequently, we have developed an R package and shinyapp to support the use and interpretation of BIO-WELL by end-users. BIO-WELL has also been translated into 30 languages. We also undertook a comprehensive interrogation of the environmental economics literature to examine long-term temporal shifts in the monetary values people place on biodiversity. Although a diversity of cultural ecosystem services and forest types have been studied over the years, the existing evidence-base is biased towards high-income countries and recreational forest use. Finally, we used national-scale questionnaires, involving >7000 participants, to quantify people’s values for biodiversity attributes, bring together BIO-WELL and choice experiments (a methodological technique from environmental economics).
Objective 3. This objective was tackled through the approaches already mentioned above. From a temporal perspective, we particularly focused on seasonality. We have innovated methodologically by using the participatory workshops to inform the choice of attributes and levels that were used in seasonal choice experiments; normally, the attributes and levels are decided by experts/researchers. By combining our monetary (choice experiments) and non-monetary valuation (BIO-WELL) methods, we found that people’s willingness-to-pay for local forest creation is influenced by the wellbeing (measured via BIO-WELL) that participants get from existing forests. This is a particularly important message for policy/practice decision-makers. Finally, we have explored how species and/or traits (e.g. textures, smells) that elicit human wellbeing responses vary spatially and seasonally across Britain (the RELATE study system). High ‘quality’ forests (those that have the most species traits that support human wellbeing) are unequally distributed, with individuals living in more deprived areas generally having lower quality forest nearby.