Predicting trends of societal interest in biodiversity
Jay Whitehead is researching how the societal concern in biodiversity issues is changing over time. A better understanding of these trends will help governments and businesses to respond more quickly to society’s needs and formulate future-oriented policy.
To determine what actions are needed, the National Science Challenges’ team “New Zealand’s Biological Heritage” is building a national Eco-index. This initiative is linking current investment in biodiversity by major land management sectors with the outcome being achieved. It will identify the best ways to direct actions – by the public and private sectors and by communities – to reverse biodiversity decline. It will guide land managers toward incremental actions that can cumulatively create intergenerational impact and reverse biodiversity decline in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Predicting Society’s interest in biodiversity
As part of this research, we investigated social interest in biodiversity. Societal concern for biodiversity issues can increasingly be predicted with ‘big data’. The combination of powerful new data analytics tools and enormous data sets has created new opportunities to predict trends across multiple domains. For instance, research has shown that big data on internet search traffic can reliably predict the spread of disease significantly earlier than traditional surveillance systems; predict depression; provide early warning signs of stock market moves; predict private consumption patterns; predict housing market trends; predict tourism demand; predict election results; predict unemployment rates; predict social perceptions; and predict public interest in different issues across time and space.
There is often a significant lag between societal concerns arising and those concerns being addressed. Markets are usually the first to notice societal trends, and products and services arise to meet those trends. Regulation tends to lag markets and can lag societal concerns by many years. The use of big data makes it possible to anticipate future trends to provide business and government early warning signals of significant changes. Biodiversity presents a high degree of uncertainty and risk to government and business. Despite the high level of success in predicting economic and social trends, little research has been conducted on the potential of internet data to address biodiversity challenges. Biodiversity responses tend to be reactionary. We propose that the successful use of big data to address complex issues suggests that big data could provide a powerful new methodological approach for anticipating and addressing important biodiversity challenges.
To determine the New Zealand public’s interest in a range of biodiversity topics, we extracted search data from Google. We selected 53 biodiversity related search terms and tracked New Zealand’s search trends for these terms over a five-year period from November 2015 to October 2020. It is not possible to determine absolute numbers for search terms based on the data available from Google. Rather, trends are normalised between 0 and 100 over the period, so that a value of 100 represents the highest search traffic for a particular term within a particular timeframe. We can therefore determine relative interest in biodiversity topics over time but cannot comment on absolute numbers. For the analysis, we are more interested in trends than absolute numbers, however, other methods are available to estimate absolute numbers that can be explored for their relevance to the Eco-Index in the future. An interactive cart displaying all 53 search terms is available at http://sustainablewellbeing.nz/biotrends
In the table below we report the 10 topics that have shown the largest increase in interest for the New Zealand public over the past five years, and the 10 topics that have shown the largest decreases.
Based on this sample of topic trends it is possible to make some generic observations. The topics decreasing in interest tend towards conservation and protection topics. They are also a mix of traditional environmental management terminology, e.g., conservation, pest control, ecology, as well as more recent terminology such as natural capital and ecosystem services. There are several hypotheses we can consider explaining the declining interest in these topics, organised from most credible to least:
Conservation and protection are no longer enough, for example, environmental discussions in the scientific literature have turned towards restoration and regeneration.
Terms like ecosystem services trend for a while then go out of fashion over time.
These topics are well understood to the point that people do not need to search for information on them anymore.
New terminology has arisen to cover these topics.
On the increasing side of the spectrum are a few distinct groups of terms. There are terms relating to specific initiatives or unique issues, e.g., Billion trees, Inaturalist predator free, and Kauri dieback. There are te reo terms, e.g., kaitiakitanga and taiao. There are terms related to the way businesses tend to market products with environmental attributes, e.g., environmentally friendly and eco-friendly. Finally, there are terms that represent products, e.g., rat trap and bird feeder. Again, there are several hypotheses as to why these terms are increasing:
Specific issues and initiatives are more likely to be broadcast in the media creating subsequent public interest.
Terms related to purchasing decisions for products with environmental credence attributes are increasing, following widespread increases in demand for sustainable consumer products.
Te reo is experiencing a resurgence which is generating increased public interest in te reo terms.
These findings have implications for the Eco-Index in several areas. Societies interests are the major driving force behind consumer markets and government policy. The Eco-Index is not intended to be post hoc window on New Zealand’s biodiversity, but rather, it is intended to anticipate future issues and in doing so, inform different institutions of current deficiencies and help guide them towards appropriate responses. All institutions seek to meet the needs of multiple different stakeholders. These stakeholders’ needs are grounded in societies interests. Therefore, if the Eco-Index aligns to the interests of society, it will have a higher likelihood of anticipating the rapidly evolving consumer interest and anticipate future government policy.
Author: Jay Whitehead.
Jay is the indicator specialist and environmental economist for the Eco-index research team as part of the National Science Challenge “New Zealand’s Biological Heritage”.
