Contrasting effects of visiting urban green-space and the countryside on biodiversity knowledge and conservation support

Conservation policy frequently assumes that increasing people’s exposure to green-space enhances their knowledge of the natural world and desire to protect it. Urban development is, however, considered to be driving declining connectedness to nature. Despite this the evidence base supporting the assumption that visiting green-spaces promotes biodiversity knowledge and conservation support, and the impacts of urbanization on these relationships, is surprisingly limited. Using data from door-to-door surveys of nearly 300 residents in three pairs of small and large urban areas in England we demonstrate that people who visit green-space more regularly have higher biodiversity knowledge and support for conservation (measured using scales of pro-environmental behavior). Crucially these relationships only arise when considering visits to the countryside and not the frequency of visits to urban green-space. These patterns are robust to a suite of confounding variables including nature orientated motivations for visiting green-space, socio-economic and demographic factors, garden-use and engagement with natural history programs. Despite this the correlations that we uncover cannot unambiguously demonstrate that visiting the countryside improves biodiversity knowledge and conservation support. We consider it likely, however, that two mechanisms operate through a positive feedback loop i.e. increased visits to green-space promote an interest in and knowledge of biodiversity and support for conservation, which in turn further increase the desire to visit green-space and experience nature. The intensity of urbanization around peoples’ homes, but not city size, is negatively associated with their frequency of countryside visits and biodiversity knowledge. Designing less intensely urbanized cities with good access to the countryside, combined with conservation policies that promote access to the countryside thus seems likely to maximize urban residents’ biodiversity knowledge and support for conservation

‘Green’ on the ground but not in the air: Pro-environmental attitudes are related to household behaviours but not discretionary air travel

The rise in greenhouse gas emissions from air travel could be reduced by individuals voluntarily abstaining from, or reducing, flights for leisure and recreational purposes. In theory, we might expect that people with pro-environmental value orientations and concerns about the risks of climate change, and those who engage in more pro-environmental household behaviours, would also be more likely to abstain from such voluntary air travel, or at least to fly less far. Analysis of two large datasets from the United Kingdom, weighted to be representative of the whole population, tested these associations. Using zero-inflated Poisson regression models, we found that, after accounting for potential confounders, there was no association between individuals’ environmental attitudes, concern over climate change, or their routine pro-environmental household behaviours, and either their propensity to take non-work related flights, or the distances flown by those who do so. These findings contrasted with those for pro-environmental household behaviours, where associations with environmental attitudes and concern were observed. Our results offer little encouragement for policies aiming to reduce discretionary air travel through pro-environmental advocacy, or through ‘spill-over’ from interventions to improve environmental impacts of household routines