KEVIN J GASTON

Baker, D.J., Nye, C., Wheeler, R., Masquelier, C., Binner, A., Gaston, K.J., Heard, M.S., Lobley, M., Smith, D. & Maclean, I.M.D. 2025. Aligning strategic and participatory approaches to agri-environment scheme design and implementation to enhance nature recovery outcomes. People and Nature 7, 329-345.

1. Nature recovery requires the provisioning of resources in the right place and in sufficient quantities to support wildlife populations and improve ecological processes. Agri-environment schemes (AES) have been a major mechanism for delivering environmental management across EU-farmed landscapes, but measured benefits to nature are often negligible in large part due to a lack of strategic spatial targeting of management actions.

2. As an example, AES in England are often delivered using a participatory strategy, typically at individual farm scale, with types of management agreements and uptake reflecting the business model and interests of each farm. However, this implementation model can result in poorly distributed conservation resources and, consequently, a failure to recover nature across larger scales, even if individual agreements are delivered well.

3. Achieving effective, large-scale nature recovery through AES requires aligning its implementation with spatially targeted approaches that prioritise specific conservation goals. We discuss the rationale for, and major barriers to, aligning AES design and implementation to these approaches. We then highlight how, through the framework of systematic conservation planning, both the strategic and participatory components of AES could be aligned better to enhance nature recovery outcomes.

4. To ensure AES help achieve nature recovery goals, clear and measurable targets must be set with the type and spatial configuration of actions designed to enable meeting targets. Strategic spatial targeting must also be carried out with the implementation phase in mind, accounting for socio-economic opportunities and barriers to engagement and acknowledging that uncertainties around farm-scale implementation mean plans must be adaptable. Participatory approaches for AES design and implementation that support the delivery of spatially targeted management actions are required, most notably by facilitating collaboration or cooperation across farm holdings.

5. For AES to contribute effectively to nature recovery goals, aligning strategic and participatory approaches in its design and implementation is crucial. This requires uniting knowledge across disciplines and cultures and ensuring that information is shared to support progressive refinement of scheme design and guidance towards achieving overall nature recovery goals.

Soga, M. & Gaston, K.J. 2025. Cross-country variation in people’s connection to nature. One Earth 8, 101194.

Enhancing pro-nature behavior across societies is a key sustainability challenge, with people’s connection to nature recognized as a primary driver. Understanding how this connection varies across countries and regions and the factors influencing it is, therefore, a crucial step in addressing this challenge. However, this remains poorly understood due to the scarcity of cross-country studies, particularly outside the Global North. Using data from a survey spanning 23 countries worldwide, we identified substantial variations in individuals’ psychological (cognitive) and physical (experiential) connections to nature. These differences are influenced by several country-level factors, such as socioeconomic development and the extent of cultivated land, alongside individual-level factors like education level and social status. The broad variation in connection to nature revealed by our study provides valuable insights for predicting large-scale spatial patterns of this connection and identifying regions where targeted efforts are most needed to strengthen it effectively.

Wilkinson, R., Mleczko, M.M., Brewin, R.J.W., Gaston, K.J., Mueller, M., Shutler, J.D., Yan, X. & Anderson, K. 2024. Environmental impacts of earth observation data in the constellation and cloud computing era. Science of the Total Environment 909, 168584.

 Numbers of Earth Observation (EO) satellites have increased exponentially over the past decade reaching the current population of 1193 (January 2023). Consequently, EO data volumes have mushroomed and data storage and processing have migrated to the cloud. Whilst attention has been given to the launch and in-orbit environmental impacts of satellites, EO data environmental footprints have been overlooked. These issues require urgent attention given data centre water and energy consumption, high carbon emissions for computer component manufacture, and difficulty of recycling computer components. Doing so is essential if the environmental good of EO is to withstand scrutiny. We provide the first assessment of the EO data life-cycle and estimate that the current size of the global EO data collection is ~807 PB, increasing by ~100 PB/year. Storage of this data volume generates annual CO2 equivalent emissions of 4101 t. Major state-funded EO providers use 57 of their own data centres globally, and a further 178 private cloud services, with considerable duplication of datasets across repositories. We explore scenarios for the environmental cost of performing EO functions on the cloud compared to desktop machines. A simple band arithmetic function applied to a Landsat 9 scene using Google Earth Engine (GEE) generated CO2 equivalent (e) emissions of 0.042–0.69 g CO2e (locally) and 0.13–0.45 g CO2e (European data centre; values multiply by nine for Australian data centre). Computation-based emissions scale rapidly for more intense processes and when testing code. When using cloud services such as GEE, users have no choice about the data centre used and we push for EO providers to be more transparent about the location-specific impacts of EO work, and to provide tools for measuring the environmental cost of cloud computation. The EO community as a whole needs to critically consider the broad suite of EO data life-cycle impacts.

Soga, M. & Gaston, K.J. 2024. Global synthesis indicates widespread occurrence of shifting baseline syndrome. BioScience 74, 686-694.

As environmental degradation continues at local, regional, and global levels, people’s accepted norms for natural environmental conditions are likely to decline. This phenomenon, known as shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), is increasingly recognized as a likely major obstacle to addressing global environmental challenges. However, the prevalence of SBS remains uncertain. We conducted an extensive systematic review, synthesizing existing research on people’s perceived environmental baselines. Our analysis, based on 73 case studies, suggests that SBS is a widespread global phenomenon, occurring across diverse socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural settings. We observed that younger individuals tend to hold lower environmental baselines across various environmental contexts, including climate change, natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and pollution. An upward shift in perceived environmental baselines among younger generations was rarely observed. These results underscore the challenge that SBS poses when policy and management responses to environmental degradation are influenced by perceived natural environmental norms.

Soga, M. & Gaston, K.J. 2024. Extinction of experience due to climate change. Nature Climate Change 14, 108-110.

Ongoing climate change has the potential to reduce people’s direct experiences with nature, leading to or further exacerbating the ‘extinction of experience’. We argue that understanding these impacts is crucial, as the extinction of experience can have adverse consequences for both humans and the natural environment.

Morrell, S., Hatchell, J., Wordingham, F., Bennie, J., Inston, M.J. & Gaston, K.J. 2024. Changing streetlighting schemes and the ecological availability of darkness. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 21, 20230555.

Artificial light at night (ALAN), from streetlights and other sources, has a wide variety of impacts on the natural environment. A significant challenge remains, however, to predict at intermediate spatial extents (e.g. across a city) the ALAN that organisms experience under different lighting regimes. Here we use Monte Carlo radiative Transfer to model the three-dimensional lighting environment at, and just above, ground level, on the spatial scales at which animals and humans experience it. We show how this technique can be used to model a suite of both real and hypothetical lighting environments, mimicking the transition of public infrastructure between different lighting technologies. We then demonstrate how the behaviour of animals experiencing these simulated lighting environments can be emulated to probe the availability of darkness, and dark corridors, within them. Our simulations show that no single lighting technology provides an unmitigated alleviation of negative impacts within urban environments, and that holistic treatments of entire lighting environments should be employed when understanding how animals use and traverse them.