Six actions to harness the potential of social surveys on people and nature relations

Journal article

1. Robust data on the state of relationships between people and nature is a critical component of the evidence base for environmental governance at local, national and global scales.
2. Social surveys are a valuable method already used by some governmental and non-governmental organisations to gather this evidence. However, a lack of coordination hampers efforts to harness the potential of people-and-nature surveys to better inform policy and practice.
3. Specifically, designers and administrators of people-and-nature surveys should ensure that surveys are relevant to current policy challenges, robust in their use of socially and statistically-validated questions and the data produced are accessible to diverse communities for research, practice and advocacy.
4. Integrating the experience of a group of UK survey researchers and practitioners, this Perspective identifies six actions to enhance the value of people-and-nature surveys for environmental governance: strengthen access to survey data; co-define meaningful constructs and questions; invest in continuing datasets; mix methods appropriately; track the use and impact of survey insights; and foster partnerships and capacity sharing to enable these actions.
5. Together, these actions could enable people-and-nature surveys to better serve user needs, build cross-scale usability and contribute critical insights on progress towards national and global environmental goals.

Authors: Montana, J; Anderson, LM; Marshall, T; Barrios-O'Neill, D; Bavin, S

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: People and Nature
• Acceptance date: 2026-05-22
• EISSN: 2575-8314
• Language: English
• Keywords: administrative data; environmental social science; people-and-nature survey; people-nature relations; public datasets; survey methods