Strengthening People’s Relationships with Biodiversity

Abstract

The project is undertaken for the organization of British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums(BIAZA). BIAZA is an association with 121 member zoos and aquariums in the UK and Ireland. It’s member zoos and aquariums receive a whopping audience of about 35 million visitors every year, which is more than half of the total populations of the UK and Ireland combined. The initial brief from BIAZA was ‘How can their member zoos and aquariums leverage the huge audience to drive a positive societal change?” To answer the question, the project begins to explore four main domains of research: Biodiversity, Behavioral change, The UK as a society, and Zoos and Aquariums. for its aesthetic value and has limited knowledge about his/her relationships with the animal world. This lack of recognition and acknowledgment of one’s relationships with the animal world weakens one’s environmental identity. Hence, ‘development of an identity that recognizes and acknowledges one’s relationships with the natural world’ is defined as the ‘change to aim for’. lives as they leave the zoo. Hence the app takes the visitors Beyond the zoo and also remains with the visitor beyond the zoo. Following the design, the concept is prototyped and tested with the users and validates by a zoo educator. The concept received extremely positive feedback from both of them establishing its desirability, feasibility, and viability. From the research about Biodiversity, it is derived that Biodiversity is crucial for the maintenance of Ecosystems. Human life in many ways depend on the ecosystem services. However, biodiversity is declining globally at an alarmingly fast pace due to human activities such as intensified agricultural, overexploitation, and pollution. At the core of such systemic activities, lies an individual’s everyday behaviors. This project aims to influence these individual behaviors. The insights from the behavioral change literature suggest that many factors influence one’s behaviors including environmental identity, which is the best predictor of one’s pro-environmental behaviors. Through this lens of behavioral change, the UK society’s engagement with the problem of loss of biodiversity is explored via interviews and literature research. It is concluded that overall a typical UK citizen loves nature and wildlife Based on the change to aim for, the context of Zoos is explored to recognize the efforts of zoos to educate people about conservation and the effects these efforts have on the visitors. It is concluded that zoos show great potential for the development of identity because of the presence of a live animal’s ability to generate an emotional connection with the animal. Based on the capacity of zoos to connect people with the animals, the role of zoos in moving forward towards the systemic direction is “To strengthen people’s relationships with biodiversity”. With the goal for the zoos defined, a three phased approach of Show, Sensitize and Inspire is proposed to the zoos to move forward towards achieving this goal.. Based on the proposed approach, the concept of “Beyond the Zoo” is designed. The major part of the concept is an app supported by minor physical infrastructures at the zoo. The app can be downloaded by the visitors and is designed to work in tandem with a zoo visit. The concept is designed to motivate visitors to learn more about the interspecific relationships between animals in an engaging and exciting ‘treasure hunt’s fashion. The app is also designed to engage people in recognizing the contributions of biodiversity to their everyday life and subsequently inspire and support them to take positive actions in their own The project ends with providing implementation guidelines and other recommendations to BIAZA for moving forward with this particular concept and towards the systemic direction defined for zoos.