Activities and events are often run on nature reserves to engage people with nature and hopefully encourage pro-conservation behaviours in their lives. Victoria Carr CPsychol., Conservation Scientist and Dr Joelene Hughes, Principal Conservation Scientist explain their latest research, recently published in Biological Conservation, which looks at what makes these activities more successful.
Getting people engaged in nature is one really important way of motivating behaviours that have positive benefits for species, habitats and the environment. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have access to a lot of nature and for many people it may present an unknown world that doesn’t appear to play a huge role in their day-to-day lives.
Conservation organisations run various different activities, both on- and off-nature reserves, from pond-dipping to Red Deer watches, guided walks to drop-in stalls at festivals, to engage people with nature. One important aim of these activities is to strengthen people’s connection to nature and hopefully, eventually, motivate conservation behaviour.
However, people running these activities ask many questions - how effective are these activities in creating that nature connection? What make activities more successful in building nature connection? And which ones could work best in my reserve?
Red deer watch at Eastern Moors, 2018 © Louise Baddeley
Using ENACT
We used the Evaluating Nature Activities For Connection Tool (ENACT), to look at the huge range of activities conducted on nature reserves to try and answer these questions. ENACT was previously developed to identify and assess what makes activities on nature reserves more likely to build nature connection and lead adults to engage more with nature.
In the current research, we evaluated which types of activities produced higher ENACT scores, what factors influential both within and across activities, and demonstrated how ENACT could be used as part of a cost-benefit analysis to inform which types of activities to run on a reserve.
Results of the study
Thanks to an amazing effort from RSPB reserve colleagues, data was gathered at 27 reserves from over 1100 adults, covering 100 activities. Analysis of the full data showed that there were clear differences in ENACT scores between different types of activities, indicating that some types are better than others at building short-term nature connection and encouraging repeat engagement with nature.
Our results showed that ‘Group-based’ events, where a group of people attend for the duration of the activity, worked better than ‘Drop-in’ events, where people join or leave the activity as desired. High-value events (e.g. exclusive experiences) and Regular activities (core visitor activities, e.g. guided walks) were both more effective in stimulating short-term connection than large, mass engagement events. This pattern of results was particularly true for adults who had a lower pre-existing level of nature connection, which is a crucial audience for conservation organisations to engage with.
Running costs
We conducted a cost-benefit analysis to illustrate how the potential nature connection benefits of different activities related to the costs of running these activities, and to suggest how activities might be improved in terms of nature connection. For this analysis, we grouped the 100 nature activities into 30 activity groups, so that we could look in more detail at how different activities scored on ENACT.
Results showed that all activity groups achieved relatively high ENACT scores, suggesting all had good connection potential. Activity groups that scored highest on ENACT scores were fungi walks, bird ringing demonstrations, some specialist guided walks and high-value species-focused events. The research contains further information about how activities perform on ENACT, including how different activities promote different aspects within ENACT.
This research has provided a new form of activity evaluation evidence that we did not have before, about the nature connection potential of activities. This evidence can be used alongside existing evaluation information to inform decisions about how to improve, create and choose which nature activities to run. The hope is that this will lead to improved engagement with nature and increased nature conservation behaviour in the future.
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