Promoting Education and Awareness About Plant Diversity

Achievements

A global survey carried out by BGCI revealed that 91% of botanic gardens include education in their mission. This is very encouraging. Sessions have demonstrated that botanic gardens carry out a wide range of education and interpretation programmes and that they are increasing their efforts in environmental education and education for sustainability.

Education provision complements many other botanic garden activities. For example, involving communities in conserving medicinal plants and eradicating invasive species.

Botanic gardens reach a wide range of audiences from school children through to the general public, local communities and tourists with traditional and innovative programmes, including signage, exhibits, events, classes and field trips. Botanic gardens are increasingly becoming extended classrooms for schools and life-long learning.

Collectively, botanic gardens make a significant contribution to implementing Target 14 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation incorporating the importance of plant diversity and the need for its conservation into communication, educational and public awareness programmes.

Challenges

Our world is facing major environmental challenges such as climate change, poverty, environmental degradation, lack of sustainability of food systems and rapid urbanisation At the moment, relatively few botanic gardens are developing communication and education programmes to tackle these issues. Botanic gardens need to stimulate reflection and discussion about these topics with their visitors.

Evaluation is essential for ensuring botanic gardens reach appropriate audiences with relevant messages. There appears to be a lack of qualitative evaluation and research on communication, education and public awareness provision being carried out in botanic gardens. This has implications for the quality and type of programmes offered and their success. To address this, botanic gardens need to find new ideas and methodologies for interpreting messages, i.e. thinking outside the box and creating a new paradigm.

Through communication, education and public awareness provision, botanic gardens reach large numbers of specific audiences, e.g. university students, school children and families. However there appears to be a gap with reaching target audiences such as decision makers, business leaders, people with disabilities and those audiences not currently visiting the botanic garden.

Many gardens report a lack of investment for communication and education provision, whether in terms of finance, resources, staff or capacity building. This may reflect a link with the lack of contact with decision makers and potential funders.

There has been a decline in the teaching of plant science in schools in many regions of the world. Botanic gardens need to address this through their programmes, networking with other scientific and education institutions and influencing policy.

Gardens currently do not make the most of using their unique opportunity to provide ecotourism experiences for their visitors. They can begin by committing themselves to sustainability, using these principles to guide their work and communicating them to their visitors.

Recommendations

In addition to incorporating Target 14 within their education, communication and public awareness programmes, botanic gardens need to address some of the key contemporary environmental and social issues, including climate change, poverty alleviation, food security, alien invasives and urbanization. In addressing these issues there must be an emphasis on attitude and behavioural change with the aim of achieving sustainable development.

Botanic gardens must attract or provide more investment for their education programmes. This may be through targeting policy makers, business leaders and the media, engaging in partnerships and networks, offering capacity building, employing appropriately qualified educators and reaching new audiences, such as ecotourists.

Botanic gardens should carry out research and evaluation to determine audiences, tailor programmes to their requirements and ascertain that these requirements are being met. Botanic gardens need to utilise new technology such as that offered by the internet, and incorporate environmental thinking in their programme development, for example systems theory can be used to illustrate connectivity and biological complexity.

Botanic gardens should address the perceived reduction in plant science education through their education provision, networking with other scientific and education institutions and influencing policy.

There are a wide range of training needs at several levels, but with limited trainers available. A key need is to maximise training by:

Identifying key training needs
Developing standardized multi-lingual training materials
Recognising local issues, needs and resource availability
Appropriate certification based on simple but rigorous assessment.

Botanic gardens have an increasingly important role to play in communication, education and public awareness. Research needs to be undertaken to determine their impact and verify their importance in creating a sustainable global society.
Botanic gardens need to ensure that they are fun, exciting, provocative, innovative and relevant places for people to visit and engage with the messages being communicated.

Welcome to BGCI's Education Portal

One of BGCI's key work areas is in Education - the provision of materials for people in botanic gardens to use in their education programmes of all kinds. This section is here to support botanic garden and other environmental educators in their work, so we can all see plant diversity flourishing.