Tackling a challenge such as Biodiversity Awareness is no easy feat. For the last 7 weeks, our Leitrim challengers have used a collection of Design Thinking Tools and Exercises to help them in their quest to promote Biodiversity in the area. They worked together to create a survey, ensuring that they were asking the right questions to the general public in the county in order to see what they could uncover. Incredibly, in a short space of time, Leitrim’s Biodiversity group had an amazing response from 169 people, and with these responses we were able to look at the insights and understanding of the people of Co. Leitrim and their relationship with local natural resources, flora and fauna; and the birds, mammals and insects they encounter.

We first looked at our opening question, which asked how important Biodiversity was to the participant, followed up with their reasoning behind their answer. To our relief and delight, the majority of people (82%) answered that it was very important to them, and only a very small percentage (2%) said that it wasn’t important at all. However, this specific response was given as part of a face to face conversation in our survey-  which then changed along the course of the survey conversation, for the person to conclude that it was important after all. One of our team noted that “Some people may not say it's important to them, but actually after a conversation- they do realise that it is! Together, we noted that some people found it challenging to give their reasoning behind why they thought Biodiversity was important to them, and perhaps warmed more to the topic towards the end of the survey. We questioned if the very act of conversation moved people towards a more empathetic understanding of the importance of Biodiversity in the county. We also wondered if we were to ask the same question at the beginning of the survey and again at the end, would their response change in any way?

Do you think that Conversation and understanding are our best tools to help to protect our local biodiversity?

What are your thoughts on the issue? We’d love to hear in the comments below.

If you are interested in taking on a local challenge, you can find out more on our Innovating Communities homepage https://www.innovating.ie/