We’d love to talk Building services all day, but we’re aware that most of our readers have more interest in our environmental posts.  Some topics are hotter than others…  more now from the defra 2009 Public attitudes and behaviours towards the environment survey.

Defra asked respondents to list reasons why biodiversity should be conserved and asked them to rank them in order of importance, starting with the most important. The reasons given were:
- It makes green open spaces more pleasant places to visit
- It contributes to the quality of our air and water
- We cannot afford to lose species that might one day provide medical or other benefits we have not yet discovered
- We all have a duty to minimise our impacts on nature and the planet.

For the purposes of the current analysis, these reasons have been ranked according to the proportion of respondents that selected them as either the 1st or 2nd most important reason, followed by the proportion that selected them as either the 3rd or 4th most important reason. Table 40 summarises this analysis for each of the factors.

DEFRA September 2009

Respondents reported that the most important reason to conserve biodiversity (of the four) was “we all have a duty to minimise our impacts on nature and the planet‟. 65% selected this as either their first or second most important reason and were least likely to select this as the third or fourth most important (35% selected this).
The second and third options in Table 40 (“we cannot afford to lose species that might one day provide medical or other benefits we have not yet discovered‟ and “it contributes to the quality of our air and water‟) were rated as of similar importance. About half of respondents selected one of these two statements as either their first or second most important reason (52% and 51% respectively). However, a similar proportion selected these statements as their third or fourth most important reasons.
Overall, the least important reason as judged by respondents was “it makes green open spaces more pleasant places to visit‟ – one third (33%) of respondents selected this as either the first or second most important reason, while around double this proportion (67%) selected it as either the third or fourth most important reason.

Public attitudes and behaviours towards the environment – tracker survey DEFRA September 2009