Environment strategy: behaviour changes needed to achieve Scotland's goals for biodiversity

7 Conclusions and recommendations

In this section we summarise the key findings of the research and outline recommendations for policymakers seeking to encourage behaviour change to protect and enhance biodiversity.

7.1 What can private citizens do to help protect and enhance biodiversity?

The literature review highlighted a wide range of behaviours of private citizens that are relevant to addressing biodiversity objectives. Excluding behaviours that aligned more with net zero and circular economy policy objectives, we developed a framework of 43 pro-biodiversity behaviours (Table 2), covering eight behavioural categories. This framework incorporates private, public and social-sphere behaviours, spanning various domains including consumption, stewardship and outdoor recreation. Based on literature on the underlying motivational factors that might drive multiple pro-biodiversity behaviours, we also highlighted an additional behaviour – spending time in natural environments – as relevant for policymakers to consider alongside the eight pro-biodiversity behaviour categories of: eating less meat, choosing sustainable product options, conservation volunteering, wildlife gardening, managing the impacts of pets, leaving natural places as you found them, championing biodiversity, and investing in biodiversity.

7.2 What are the potential impacts of changing behaviours?

Chapter 4 drew together evidence on the different pathways by which the identified behaviours can impact on biodiversity and, where available, on the scale of potential impacts of changing behaviours. Those behaviours with the greatest potential to benefit global biodiversity fall within the consumption and financial domains. In particular, given the role of food production-consumption systems in driving biodiversity loss, changes in consumption behaviours around food have the potential to impact strongly on biodiversity internationally. Financial behaviours around investing in biodiversity through directly donating to conservation organisations and making biodiversity-friendly investments (e.g. in pension funds) also have considerable potential to support biodiversity, by mobilising capital to fund biodiversity protection and improvement, and away from activities that threaten biodiversity.

Those behaviours with most potential to create positive impacts on Scotland’s biodiversity relate to stewardship activities like conservation volunteering and wildlife gardening, and responsible outdoor recreation activities, encompassing leaving natural places as you found them and managing the impacts of pets when walking dogs in protected areas. These behaviours also have the potential to create synergistic effects beyond their direct impacts on biodiversity, including for human health and wellbeing, improving local environments, developing human-nature connections and spreading positive social norms around nature-friendly practices.

Other behaviours have the potential to support biodiversity in more indirect, but not necessarily less important ways. Behaviours within the championing biodiversity category have the potential to influence powerful actors and institutions through politics and advocacy, and through (often overlooked) social-sphere behaviours that include talking about nature and biodiversity and supporting others in adopting pro-biodiversity behaviours. These social and advocacy behaviours may be particularly important when considering how transformational change at the societal level could occur.

7.3 To what extent does existing Scottish policy support behaviour change for biodiversity?

The policy review found that each of the eight pro-biodiversity behaviour change categories is represented to some extent in Scottish Government policies. However, the level and types of supports for behavioural change varies across the policies and instruments reviewed, as might be expected. For example, there was high coverage of responsible outdoor recreation behaviours, but limited coverage of others around championing biodiversity and investing in biodiversity as a private citizen. Across the behaviour categories, communication campaigns and guidance were common policy levers highlighted. These both aim to address primarily Motivation and Capability (in terms of knowledge/awareness) components of the COM-B behavioural system, mainly through education and persuasion. For some behaviours (e.g. relating to harming protected species, littering, dog fouling) restrictions and coercion through financial penalties are imposed via policy levers of legislation and regulation, which address the Opportunity to act in harmful ways. Policy actions addressing the Opportunity to behave in positive and desirable ways, and broader aspects of Capability (e.g. in terms of skills) were less prominent amongst the policies and instruments reviewed.

Drawing on the BCW, policy levers relating to provision of services that provide opportunities and models for engagement as well as increasing capability through education, enablement and training may help to address these gaps, as well as those relating to environmental/social planning (which includes e.g. changing physical environments to increase opportunities). Fiscal measures (using taxes) to act on Motivation were identified as a policy lever that was notably absent, although it is recognised that the fiscal levers available to the Scottish Government relating to some relevant policy areas including international trade are limited compared to those of the UK Government.

7.4 Recommendations

Integrating the findings from across the literature review and policy review, and taking into consideration discussions in the stakeholder workshop, we offer the following recommendations for encouraging behaviour change to protect and enhance biodiversity:

1. Raise awareness of what individuals can do, and the impacts of behaviour change

While understanding of actual impacts are important to tailor and prioritise policy, individuals’ perceptions of the environmental impacts of their behaviours are also important for motivation. Given these perceptions are often inaccurate^[7], public engagement on pro-biodiversity behaviours, by the Scottish Government and delivery partners like NatureScot might in itself be a valuable measure. It could seek to raise awareness, not only of what individuals can do to help to address the biodiversity crisis, but also emphasise the consequences of changed behaviours, including the substantial impacts of behaviours like eating less meat (i.e. reducing meat consumption, in favour of plant-based proteins and/or smaller quantities of more sustainably produced meat) and investing in biodiversity.

2. Adopt a theoretically grounded approach to designing policy for behaviour change

The Behaviour Change Wheel, and the process-based framework for applying it in policy development outlined in this report (section 5), offer a systematic and theoretically grounded approach to understanding the drivers of behaviours and the policy levers that may help to deliver behaviour change. The BCW also helps to identify both upstream and downstream intervention opportunities through considering the full range of policy levers available to create conditions for behaviour change to occur. Considering the barriers and drivers of behaviours through the lens of the COM-B component of the BCW would support the development of comprehensive behaviour change policies that target Opportunity and Capability, as well as the Motivation factors.

3. Be clear and specific about what behaviours policy is targeting

The eight behavioural categories outlined in this report offer opportunities for structuring clear and simple messaging for public engagement. However, it will often be necessary to be more specific about target behaviours when designing behaviour change interventions. This could mean breaking behaviour categories down to the level of the individual 43 behaviours set out in the framework in Appendix C, or for some of these to an even more granular level, to enable mapping and diagnosis of the factors influencing behaviours. At the same time, we found that the content of policies relating to some of the behaviour categories refer to behaviours an extremely broad way (e.g. encompassing reducing meat consumption within ‘healthy, sustainable diets’). We recommend that Scottish Government policy and public engagement activities communicate much more explicitly about sustainable diets – detailing specifics about what sustainable diets look like, as well as the benefits they offer, including the role of red meat consumption – to ensure sufficient attention is targeted at high impact behaviours.

4. Further develop upstream approaches to change consumption behaviours

The policy review highlighted that Scottish policy to encourage more sustainable product choices centres largely around supply chains and ‘upstream’ interventions, including guidelines for public procurement and catering in public institutions and interventions to improve the environmental sustainability of production systems. This overall approach is supported by the literature, but the evidence also highlights opportunities to go further to improve the sustainability of supply chains (e.g. mandatory due diligence obligations, border adjustment taxes, sustainable commodity import guarantees). Some such interventions would require coordination at the UK level, but strengthening procurement requirements for Scottish public bodies is something within the remit of devolved administrations and should be given consideration. Enhanced public procurement requirements could build on existing sustainability certification and ecolabelling schemes. Alongside voluntary actions by supermarkets to increase the provision of certified products, this could help to shift consumption towards more sustainable options and potentially offer opportunities to raise public awareness of certifications and ecolabels. The Scottish Government should also seek to capitalise on the opportunities that post-Brexit agricultural reform offers in terms of providing a supportive framework for Scottish farmers to deliver ecosystem services and environmentally sustainable produce at competitive prices. Doing so is line with the vision guiding the Agricultural Reform Programme^[8] but must be safeguarded in the face of competing commitments and demands on resources.

5. Deepen approaches to enable stewardship activities in gardens and local communities

While a number of policies contain provisions that relate to wildlife gardening in private gardens, policy actions for wildlife gardening are largely limited to communications and guidance. Similarly, policy actions supporting conservation volunteering centre on communication. The literature on interventions to support wildlife gardening highlights a wider range of levers to encourage these behaviours. Firstly, more tailored education and support for householders (e.g. through on-site advice, or neighbourhood-level interventions tailored to the socioeconomic context and local biodiversity priorities) would be valuable. Place-based approaches operating at the community or city level would be well suited to deliver these, offering potential not just to increase uptake but to maximise benefits for the wider habitat network by improving connectivity. Local Biodiversity Partnerships offer an existing governance structure through which local coordinated action could be supported. Local authorities could also consider opportunities to offer financial incentives for wildlife gardening and the use of local planning restrictions e.g. to limit conversion of vegetated surfaces in gardens. At the national level, the Scottish Government could build on the existing commitment to ban use of peat in growing media, by considering legislation to restrict the use of synthetic pesticides for household use, following other countries such as France. In relation to environmental volunteering, policymakers should go beyond communication, to tackle opportunity factors. They could consider the potential to support third-sector organisations providing environmental volunteering opportunities, to build capacity, combat financial barriers to engagement, and extend partnerships with public institutions and businesses.

6. Monitor pro-biodiversity behaviour changes

Further research and policy development should consider how to track changes across pro-biodiversity behaviours at the population level. This could include actions by the Scottish Government to:

• Assess the extent to which baseline information on uptake is already available for Scotland. Objective indicators may be available for some of the behaviours, e.g. drawing on purchasing data for consumption-related behaviours, or volunteer numbers recorded by organisations delivering conservation volunteering.
• Identify opportunities to address information gaps. For other behaviours, e.g. around wildlife gardening and championing biodiversity, self-report survey data might be the most practical way to track change.
• Develop robust headline indicators of behavioural uptake. Given the range of different pro-biodiversity behaviours identified in the framework (including multiple different behaviours within each of the eight behaviour categories) monitoring pro-biodiversity change in the Scottish population will require a suite of indicators or composite indicators to measure change. Self-report behavioural measures should use survey questions that are validated and sufficiently sensitive to capture change if/when it occurs. Approaches to monitoring behaviours should take into consideration psychometric measurement approaches used to measure pro-environmental behaviours in academic research, which favour multi-item scales rather than single-item measures to minimise error^[9]. It would also be useful to commission research to understand why people have changed their behaviours (or not), to inform future interventions. This may require methods such as interviews, potentially as a complementary follow-up to a sample of those participating in a survey.

7. Build evaluation of biodiversity impacts into interventions

The literature review highlighted a range of challenges in evaluating the biodiversity impacts of interventions. These include considerations around the diversity of different metrics to measure biodiversity outcomes, making comparison and benchmarking challenging (see section 4). There are also challenges in demonstrating causal relationships between interventions and any observed behaviour changes, and between behaviour changes and biodiversity outcomes. Large-scale trials of interventions are advisable, where possible incorporating baseline (pre-intervention) measurements of behavioural and biodiversity outcomes, follow-up (post-intervention) measurements of both types of outcomes (ideally at more than one time point), control or comparator group(s), and randomisation to treatment conditions. For behaviours where the geographical area of impact can be closely defined (e.g. a garden, a specific protected area) it may be possible to measure both behavioural changes and biodiversity impacts. Where biodiversity impacts of behaviour change are more diffuse or occur at a distance (in the case of regional and global impacts of consumption behaviours), modelling approaches such as Life Cycle Analysis can help to estimate impacts that cannot be directly observed.

8. Consider both targeted behaviour changes and broader societal drivers of change

Targeted interventions are required to support behaviour change, addressing the factors influencing specific behaviours. At the same time, however, the literature review highlights relevant concerns about higher-level societal trends in the way we relate to the natural world. Facilitating direct experiences of nature, including opportunities to access high quality greenspace close to home, as well as social-sphere behaviours that may help to foster positive social norms around how we talk about and act to influence biodiversity, are both relevant to ambitions to leverage long-term societal shift. Increasing time in nature is also likely to have significant benefits to health and wellbeing, which makes it a valuable policy objective in itself. At the same time, however, policymakers should be wary of simplistic assumptions that spending more time in nature will automatically result in increased connection to nature and subsequent uptake of pro-biodiversity behaviours. Relationships with nature are complex and multi-dimensional, and appreciation of nature does not necessarily lead to pro-environmental behaviour, or even to motivations to act in more environmentally sustainable ways.