Playbook for Urban Biodiversity

L11. Bring your community on the journey with educational events and citizen science

Fostering environmental education and community engagement in urban biodiversity

Discovering flora and fauna within local parks, streetscapes and backyards can be enjoyable and socially fulfilling. Opportunities to engage and educate residents and visitors can occur through educational events and citizen science, for example, conducting bioblitzes and using established online tools to aid residents in identifying species within their local area. Ecologists, council officers and Indigenous elders can be engaged as storytellers for educational events including nature walks and public events or in partnership with local schools, community centres, libraries and community groups.

Interpretive materials, both digital and physical, can also be valuable to aid park visitors to understand the species and ecosystems amongst them. Programs with high involvement, including citizen forestry or wildlife gardening, can include educational elements to enrich the connections people have with their ecosystems.

Public education is not exclusively about enriching the lived experiences of residents, but it is a prerogative to ensure that participatory processes are well informed and include all perspectives from the public. Not everyone is supportive of enriching biodiversity in urban environments, some can be opposed and inflexible – sometimes there are ‘loud voices’ that dominate events and exercise power by directly lobbying councillors. These individuals are not representative of the whole community, and initiatives like bio-blitzes, representative surveys, educational walks and interpretive materials help make the many quiet supporters of urban nature more visible to decision makers and political leaders.