Constructing a harmonised, UK-wide dataset on people's relationship with nature to inform policy

Nature is fundamentally important to people’s lives: supporting their mental and physical wellbeing, holding stocks of natural capital which underpin our economy and society, and serving as a source of inspiration and meaning. The UK’s international agreements and national policies commit to increase and enhance people's relationships with nature, and policy-makers, environmental planners and civil society organisations (CSOs) increasingly prioritise the measurement, monitoring and understanding of those relationships. Metrics of people's engagement with nature also form part of reporting commitments under international agreements such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). To date, however, relevant data are far from harmonised. Surveys on people-nature relationships are currently conducted by multiple organisations and analysed separately. For example, devolution has led to data being gathered by different public bodies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and numerous environmental CSOs commission surveys to support their work. Together, these data constitute a rich resource with the potential to make important contributions to environmental policy and management, but the survey instruments used differ in their aims, content, design and implementation, and conceptualisations of the people and nature relationship. This limits the compatibility and sharing of data, constraining the insights and meaningful analysis that could be gained from a more comprehensive and collaborative approach, including answering UK-wide questions about people and nature relations. This timely project aims to combine existing survey data resources to create a new, harmonised multidimensional dataset concerning people’s relationships with nature across the whole of the UK, and use it to address priority questions for policy-makers. Work towards this goal will be organised into three work packages, which will: Map the scope, purpose and methodological details of existing surveys covering people’s relationships with nature, develop a robust process for combining them, where appropriate, and produce a harmonised dataset covering the whole of the United Kingdom Use the harmonised dataset to examine engagement with green space across the UK, in order to inform the development and delivery of UK policy and also support monitoring of international environmental commitments under the GBF Assess the potential for our approach to be replicated outside the UK, to permit comparative work on existing relevant data sets internationally. Our proposal has been co-produced by a partnership of academics, government and CSOs and will open-up new areas of research with direct societal impact. Within the project we will use the harmonised data to study determinants of engagement with nature, to evaluate policy based on comparisons across the four nations of the UK, and to examine whether current indicators are fit for purpose. Beyond this, the harmonised data will serve as a resource for the wider research community, the project will improve collaboration between organisations that currently collect data on people’s relationships with nature and identify areas of synergy and redundancy within their work. We will share our findings and lessons-learned widely within the UK and internationally, ensuring that the data and approaches are visible and accessible to a broad range of potential users and engaging key stakeholders through workshops and reports to promote best-practice for survey-based approaches to measuring engagement with the natural environment.