This summer, as part of LINK’s Nature Protection Scorecard, we commissioned Survation to survey public opinion on government performance and the state of nature.
The results add to the mountain of evidence that there is a high level of concern for the environment and a strong political incentive for government to act.
People have noticed nature decline in their lifetimes.
A persistent challenge for environmental campaigners is shifting baseline syndrome – the idea that, as people grow up in a nature depleted world, they become blind to the extent to which biodiversity has declined.
One way to test this is to ask whether people have noticed the decline of nature in their own lifetimes. This works particularly well because, for so many of us, our idea of what nature ‘should look like’ is formed in childhood.
By this measure a clear plurality of people think the Scottish natural environment is in decline – 44% say it has worsened in their life, 31% think it’s stayed the same, and just 16% say it is improved.
The age breakdown of these results shows a clear trend – the older you are, the more likely you are to say that nature has declined in your lifetime.
It is often assumed, and polling often finds, that younger voters are the most pro-environment. What this measure shows is that, when framed around their own life experience, we can see particularly high levels of concern among older cohorts.
The number of people who think nature is in decline is rising.
We ran the same question in 2022 and so we can directly compare how attitudes might have shifted.
There is a clear rise in the number of people who think nature has declined in their lifetime (from 39% to 44%).
People are most likely to think the government is not doing enough to protect nature.
Our poll shows that half of people (49%) think the Scottish Government is not doing enough to protect nature, while a third (32%) think they’re doing the right amount. A tiny 5% said that the Scottish Government is doing too much.
The Scottish Government still gets credit for their performance.
On a more general measure – how well or badly people think the Scottish Government is doing in protecting nature – the results are more positive. 45% said the government is doing well, and 35% said it is doing badly (a similar result to 2022).
This positivity is most obvious among younger people and SNP voters, with more than 60% of SNP voters saying the party is doing a good job. But on this measure Labour, Green, and Lib Dem voters all gave the Scottish Government a net positive rating for their performance on nature.
Our polling has previously found that supporters of those four parties are the most likely to hold pro-environment attitudes. This suggests that environmentally-minded voters are giving some degree of credit to the Scottish Government for their commitment to nature and climate, even if – as the other questions demonstrate – there remain high levels of concern over the state of nature and a desire for a stronger response.
Polling conducted by Survation, commissioned by Scottish Environment LINK. 2022 poll was conducted between 31st October – 6th November 2022 with a sample size of 1033. 2026 poll was conducted between 5th August –10th August 2026 with a sample size of 1007.
Featured image: Simon Jones