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

摘要

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