Volunteering

Stephen Hall - Defra

How can we improve our measurements of engagement with biodiversity?

(Or, put another way)

How do we measure whether people care about species and habitats;

whether they understand their importance; and

whether they care enough to do something

(Or, put another way)

How do we measure our dependency on volunteering to maintain,

enhance and record biodiversity

Volunteering and other measures of public engagement feature in both the UK Biodiversity Indicators and the England Biodiversity Strategy, but we have two questions to consider – (i) how do we measure it? and (ii) what does it mean when we have measured it? A third question is reflected in the alternative titles above: (iii) Are we after a measure of engagement to show that people care or a measure of engagement to show how important volunteering is? If the former we might just want to see an increase, for the latter we might want to quantify it in terms of volunteer effort.

The existing indicator on volunteering is an index of volunteer time spent in biodiversity conservation in selected conservation organisations, from which Defra seeks information each year. Biodiversity conservation has been defined to cover:

(a)countryside management

(b)survey and data input

(c)administrative and office support

(d)‘other conservation volunteering’, which includes activities such as fundraising, training, and educational events

There is an immediate definitional problem that not all of the above would necessarily be related to ‘biodiversity conservation’. For example work could be related to improving public access rather than direct conservation. So our fourth question is (iv) Are we covering the right forms of volunteer activity?

So far the organisations that have been included in the index have been eight major UK conservation charities: Bat Conservation Trust, British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, British Trust for Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation, Plantlife, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, and a public body, Natural England.

For the next update of the indicator, there no new figures from The Wildlife Trusts, however the indicator will newly include data for the Lake District National Park, Northumberland National Park, Peak District National Park, Exmoor National Park, Loch Lomond National Park, the Soils Association, British Waterways, and the Botanical Society of the British Isles. One organisation that is a notably absent is the National Trust, which runs extensive locally and nationally-run volunteer programmes, but unfortunately is unable to collate the data needed.

So our fifth and sixth questions are: (v) Are the right organisations being covered?and (vi) Are the trends in volunteering likely to be representative of over volunteering trends?

Some organisations are able to provide both number of volunteers and volunteer hours, whilst others are only able to provide one of these. It is therefore necessary to impute number of volunteer hours for those who only provide the former. (vii) Is it reasonable to apply an average number of hours or should this vary depending on the type of organisation and the nature of its activities?

Some organisations have not been able to provide data for all years, and so in some instances data are imputed by look at trends for other organisations (viii) Is it reasonable to impute data by applying average trends?

The organisations for which we have data do not cover all volunteering and so the aggregate does not represent the total volunteering for biodiversity conservation. The BIYP indicator is therefore presented as an index rather than the absolute values. (ix) Is it reasonable to present volunteering as an index rather than absolute values? This does at least also allow the inclusion of organisations for which it is not possible to obtain data for earlier years, as they can be introduced into the index, without disturbing the trend.

Index of volunteer time spent in biodiversity conservation in selected UK conservation organisations, 2000-2009

Could we just use a small selection of organisations to get trends?

Correlation analysis of volunteer hours across the organisations suggest that there is a close correlation between trends for RSPB and most other organisations and similarly with the Bat Conservation Trust. So if the interest was predominantly about trends, it might be possible to get a reasonable indication simply by looking at trends for these two organisations and reduce the need to collect data from other organisations. (x) Would it be reasonable to only collect data from two representative organisations?

The table below shows the correlation coefficients using data up to 2010

Could we focus on just one type of activity – data recording?

The National Biodiversity Network Gateway provides a data warehouse for biodiversity records collated by 130 different organisations. As most of the organisations involved predominantly rely upon volunteers, the number of data records submitted to the Gateway could provide an indicator of volunteer effort. (xi) Would it be reasonable to focus on just one form of volunteering – data recording?

Are more general measures of awareness and behaviour a useful means of assessing progress?

It is possible to gain some insight on the importance placed on biodiversity in public perceptions through surveys, either in terms of attitudes / awareness or in their actions. (xii) Are these types of measures effective in measuring progress in promoting biodiversity? Examples are below:

Percentage of respondents in nationwide surveys who knew at least a little about the word ‘biodiversity’, 1996 to 2009

Percentage of responses to the statement: ‘I actively encourage wildlife in my garden (e.g. through feeding areas, or planting)’, 2009

Alternatively it may be possible to assess volunteering specifically through survey questions, for example in the 2009 public attitudes survey around 9 per cent of people claimed to volunteer for environmental organisations, as shown below:

Organisations / Respondents volunteering for organisation
National Trust/NT Scotland / 3.2%
RSPB / 1.9%
Wildlife trust / 1.7%
Woodland Trust / 0.7%
BTCV / 0.2%
Other environmental organisations / 1.8%

(xiii) Is using survey data on public volunteering a viable measure?

In the workshop we should like to consider the questions above and the general questions being raised in the workshop:

  1. Are there existing indicators (including in other countries) which should be considered?
  2. If so, how would they score using the quality framework used for the indicators review?
  3. What data exist at a UK/GB scale (either directly, or by aggregation from country datasets)?
  4. If UK data, can it be disaggregated to produce separate indicators for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (or just some of these and if so, which)?
  5. Are there possibilities to integrate different sources of data to produce a viable indicator at UK or country scales?
  6. Are there monitoring schemes which could be adapted to provide appropriate data from which an indicator could be built?

Environment Statistics Service, Defra

March 2011