Survey objectives:

The community appreciation of biodiversity (CAB) indicator is one of the measures in the NSW Government's Biodiversity Indicator Program reporting. The indicator is based on a set of survey questions to assess and track changes in community understanding and support of biodiversity conservation across 3 key dimensions:

• cognitive appreciation – whether people are aware of biodiversity and its benefits or values
• affective appreciation – how much people value biodiversity and whether they care about it
• behavioural appreciation – whether people are engaged in actions that protect or benefit biodiversity.

More information about the Biodiversity Indicator Program and the latest 2024 Biodiversity Outlook Report is available here: https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/animals-and-plants/biodiversity/biodiversity-indicator-program

Enhanced survey instrument:

The CAB indicator was conceptualised and developed by an external group of researchers from University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology and CSIRO. The first assessment of the indicator repurposed data from the 2015 ‘Who cares about the environment?’ survey to help understand community appreciation of biodiversity across the 3 dimensions. The findings were published in 2021.

The same external team of researchers developed an enhanced CAB indicator method for future use. The second assessment in 2022 adopted the same 3 dimensions as the first assessment, but using a purpose-built survey tool. The enhanced survey instrument retained the 22 'Who cares' survey questions used in the first assessment, for comparison and continuity, and incorporated 52 additional questions which allow the indicator to be more comprehensively assessed.
The attached 'Developing enhanced measures' report describes the development and features of this enhanced indicator. The report is also available here: https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/research-and-publications/publications-search/community-appreciation-of-biodiversity-indicator-developing-enhanced-measures

Since 2022, the NSW DCCEEW Social Science team have collected data using the enhanced CAB indicator survey on an annual basis, to track trends over time.

Methodology and reporting:

The enhanced CAB survey is issued as a 12-minute online questionnaire to a total of approximately 2,000 residents of NSW aged 18 and over. The survey was built and is hosted using the Qualtrics survey platform. A number of data quality checks are conducted at launch of each survey, and on delivery of the final data.

Qualtrics is responsible for sourcing participants from several market research panel providers. Quotas have been set by key demographics to ensure a representative sample. The final results are weighted by age group, gender, regional proportions, and Aboriginal status for NSW population. It is acknowledged that some groups may be underrepresented in the final sample - such as residents with limited English skills, residents with low or no formal education, those with limited access to internet etc.

External events - such as Covid-19 pandemic related public health orders, extreme weather events in NSW - so far have not impacted the ability to gather sample for the study. However, as this is a social research dataset, it is expected that such external events may have an impact on the environmental attitudes and behaviours that the survey has been designed to collect information on, and may explain some of the variance in the results over time.

Results are reported on an aggregated level in order to protect the privacy and anonymity of individual respondents, to meet social research industry standards, and to ensure the robustness of the results.

At the aggregate NSW level, the survey has high levels of accuracy, due to the large sample size of approximately n=2,000 responses per wave. Typically, at the 95% confidence level, the margin of error (MoE) on survey results reported on population level is approximately +/- 2.2% points or less.

Please contact Social Science Team at SocialResearch@environment.nsw.gov.au with any questions or feedback.