What is Nature Positive?

It's not a new idea, but it's gaining traction around the world as governments see the outcomes of climate change and work to reduce the impacts of environmental damage through incentives like nature repair markets and credits for repairing damaged ecosystems.

While Australia's record on climate damage and deforestation is not good, the Biodiversity Council has committed to 30 x 30; that we will protect 30% of our land and oceans by 2030 in order to prevent further biodiversity loss.  How this happens will challenge our behavioural scientists and researchers as they work with governments to change our relationship with nature from net negative to net positive.

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Pocket Change is a series of pocket-size videos about a key aspect of behaviour change.  Each episode features a BehaviourWorks Australia Researcher explaining their area of expertise in a clear and simple manner.  

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Transcript:

Geoff

This month I'm talking to Liam Smith about Nature Positive. What is Nature Positive?

Liam

I guess it's a fairly recent term, but it's an idea that's been around quite a long time. It's essentially the idea that, we can do things that have a net benefit to nature. That benefit could be many forms, like increasing habitat or improving environmental quality. But that we can do those things that have a net positive against a measurable baseline. And then we as humans or companies or organisations or governments can do things that we say, actually that's good for nature. It's not going to do more harm to nature. We think it's going to do good. So that's the broad idea of nature positive. It really got a lot of traction with the fairly recent conference of the parties in Kunming, in Montreal, Canada.

And the idea of nature positive really came out there. We need to understand what nature is and how we measure it, and then what we can do to improve it. And that's sort of how it's got traction and that's sort of translated.

I mean, some of the things that have happened subsequently to that is these countries have has gone and enacted things. In Australia we've got a new policy called the Nature Positive Plan that looks at introducing new rules and regulations as well as nature repair markets and markets that help trade essentially to try and, you know, I'm going to fix my creeks, I get some credits, and that has value.

Companies are reporting on what they are doing, to the damage they're causing, what they're doing prevent that and also trying to improve nature. So there's a bit of a movement around the world that sort of built off that, that agreement, the nature repair market in particular. I think it's the first in the world.

So we've been bold. We've also committed to 30 by 30, which is this idea that we will protect, by 2030, we will protect 30% of our land and oceans, in order to preserve biodiversity or prevent part of this loss. Of course, Australia has a terrible record.

I mean, there are there are lots of threats. Climate change is certainly one of them. But, probably in Australia, the biggest one is deforestation. So, well, land clearing actually is probably a better way of putting it. That's the biggest one. The pollution, invasive species, you know, there are a bunch of threats that are there.

People are often surprised to hear in Australia we lose one species, a species goes extinct every two years. Like, the things that cute and cuddly, things that we ought to care a lot about. And when all those threats come in, it really suffers quite badly. And we end up in this situation.

Geoff

Changing and repairing nature, means that we're going to have to change our behaviours. What does this mean from a behavioural point of view?

Liam

We've had policies in the past, and so I think these policy interventions are important and can help and can set tone and direction. But actually, we need people.

Behavioural science really hasn't been much in the conversation to date. That's fairly new, that, I sit on the Biodiversity Council. And they deliberately wanted me part of that council because they think what we've done for the last, well 200 years broadly speaking, but even the last 20 years here, manifestly hasn't worked.

Geoff

What sort of techniques to behavioural scientists have at their disposal? This is not just a Clean Up Australia Day, a campaign once a year on a Sunday to make you feel good. This is a much bigger thing.

Liam

Yeah, you're spot on. And we've been thinking a lot. And I think there's a bit of evidence to show when you paint some really big problems, that are big, hairy and complex like nature, people can feel a little bit helpless. So we want to give them some hope, You know, what can I do with my everyday life that that might make a bit of a difference. What are those things that we can do, what are those behaviours that we could do to help halt biodiversity loss here in Australia?

And, and so a couple of projects in particular, one led by Matt Zelinski at RMIT, really tried to focus in on what are the things that the average person can do and use the tool called an impact likelihood matrix, something that Sarah Kneebone from our team designed, probably 8 or 9 years ago now, and use that approach to really arrive at some specific behaviours.

And, they're things like wildlife gardening and keeping a cat contained some of your purchases that you make in particular, you know, they tried or these sorts of things like the encouraging people to do those things. And in fact, another one that came up with Matt's work was around eating less red meat, which is another one, of course, that can drive climate change, but also particularly problematic in Australia, the land clearing. So those are some things that everyone can do.

Geoff

And they can be packaged as a kind of meat free Monday or something. So it doesn't have to be cold turkey. It's gradual change.

Liam

Yes. I think that's right. And times that by 25 million whatever the population of Australia is, you really can make a difference in the behaviour itself. But you can also send signals to markets. So if all of a sudden we see a sharp uptick in uptick in the purchase of, MSC or Marine Stewardship Council seafood products, then the market sees that. Right? Like oh, okay. We need to provide more of those. There's a demand for it. And the markets will respond to that sort of stimulus.

The other category of behaviour that I think is really interesting and that's a separate piece of work, was advocacy. So providing policy support so it's giving politicians and saying to politicians or voting and saying we want progressive biodiversity policy. And we know, it's probably a bit of a no brainer, but that comes out of the experts saying, yeah, there's one thing you can do to really support biodiversity policy, whether it's at the ballot box or whether that's through donations or whether that's through, you know, a rally or whatever it happens to be.

Geoff

It's a demonstration of this is what we want, these are our values, and it can happen once every four years at an election or all the time. If it's donations that you make or stuff you share on social media.

Liam

Yeah, that's what the experts are telling us. Please advocate, advocate, advocate. And you know, 97% of people support action for nature. Most people like spending time in a park. They like seeing, native flora and fauna and interacting with that. And they see value in it. So aught not to be so hard to translate that into some support.

Geoff

So if it's something like keeping cats in, cat curfews, that is a social norm change, isn't it? It's a way of going "My pets I love them, but they can be a danger to the rest of the environment. It's up to me to do that." And, assuming, of course, that there won't be cat patrols at 2am at night, it really is a kind of a personal choice to say this thing that gives me so much pleasure. I have to control them.

Liam

So how do we persuade people? Some interesting work was done by Melbourne Zoo around this, and they came up with a, a campaign called Safe Cat, Save Wildlife. And one of the central arguments that they thought had a lot of traction, and I'll tie this back to behavioural science in a minute, was, if you keep your cat in at night, it's safer. Chances are it will live a longer life. It's less likely to get run over by vehicles. If it gets into fights with other cats, it can cause, you know, issues.

Now, how did they arrive at that argument? That's kind of the question, which is the behavioural science question, which sort of fills in that gap between, the bit about what behaviour do we want people to do, which we talked about already, and then how do I get people to do that behaviour?

And that's part of the art of behavioural science.  In our, in the BehaviourWorks Method Model, we call that the Deep Dive. It's about trying to like talk to people and get inside their heads to work out why do you keep your cat in at night? Why don't you? And then testing some different arguments to see how well, like how persuasive they are.

So, we've done similar things. Years ago I did a campaign with the Perth Zoo around the purchase of recycled toilet paper. Recycling, buying FSC type behaviour which they thought was really important.

Again, targeting that key issue in Australia, deforestation and land clearing. And we did some research to try and work out why would people buy recycled toilet paper? Why wouldn't they buy recycled toilet paper? And we came up with three things. They don't buy recycled toilet paper because it's rough, because it's weak, and because it's more expensive.

And so that's the kind of that's behavioural science in action. So it's about why do people not do that behaviour? Why do they do it? Let's understand the differences. Let's work out what some of those key messages might be, that's turned that into something that's engaging, that captures someone's attention long enough to sort of deliver a persuasive message. If it's persuasion that's your tool. And then put it in the field and see if it works. And, and that got that mostly worked, that campaign, there's some caveats around it, but I won't go into them now.

Geoff

So in the end, nature positive is a different way of looking at the way we treat the world and the impact we have on nature. It's a worldwide phenomenon, and Australia's learning to play its part as well. And anyone can take part of this. You don't have to be a landowner per se. All of us can contribute to this.

Liam

The only thing I'll probably add to that is there are some particular audiences that have a bigger stake here. I think you mentioned landowners. You know, we know the biggest issue is, is this land clearing in the Australia, what's probably the biggest issue in Australia for biodiversity and that particular one is, they're a target audience, as we would call it, we really want only to lean into. We really want to understand them, the nature repair markets were designed for them, mostly for landholders.  Yes, we all can participate, but there's probably just 2 or 3 really important audiences we also need to pay extra attention to.

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