Case Study: The Brathay Trust
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“Taming green monsters in the wild”
Brathay is a self-development, not-for-profit organisation; promoting core social and emotional attitudes, skills, and capabilities to enable a lifetime of well-being for young people from the Northwest of England.
The Project
Eco-I PhD Researcher Matt Healey is helping Brathay explore how their programmes can measure impacts on the collective well-being of people, places, and planet.
“The reality is that behaviour change is a part of reaching net zero. It is unarguable.” Sir Patrick Vallance
‘Nature-connection’ is a measure of how much people care about nature; and Britain has the lowest level of nature-connection in Europe. Most of our national policies translate nature into technological or economic terms, but nature/human well-being is clearly inter-connected. Climate change is simply no longer just a technological or economic issue. It is a monstrous green crisis of cultural communication.
We know that socially investing £1 on Outdoor Learning (OL) returns £4.32 and OL also reduces costs to the health and justice sectors. A growing body of evidence also shows that high-quality OL can change our minds about nature too. Well-designed OL can increase the social value of nature because learning in nature also teaches us about our collective responsibility to nature.
This reveals exciting potential for OL: it could help empower people to make positive consumer decisions and reduce carbon consumption, potentially reducing the need for expensive and unproven carbon reduction technologies in industry.
Engaging with young people and local ecologies, parliamentarians, policy makers, and funding organisations, Matt Healey’s research as part of Eco-I NW explores this potential. His work is showing that providers of OL are currently under-valued in the complex markets that enact Britain's education sector, and the potential is there to join-up national policies with local actions. Working with Brathay Trust, his research explores how mitigating climate change can be best achieved through promoting new ecological behaviours that appreciate social accounts of natural capital as part of a credible ‘carbon net-gain’ strategy.
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