Indicator description
There has been a substantial increase in volunteer activity
between 2000 and 2010. The indicator presents an index of the
number of hours worked by volunteers in 17 UK conservation
charities: Bat Conservation Trust, Botanical Society of the British
Isles, British Waterways, British Trust for Conservation
Volunteers, British Trust for Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation,
Exmoor National Park, Lake District National Park, Loch Lomond and
The Trossachs National Park, North York Moors National Park,
Northumberland National Park, Peak District National Park,
Plantlife, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Soil
Association, the Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, and a public
body, Natural England. The assessment is based on a three-year
average from the baseline, using the three earliest consecutive
years available.
A decrease in time spent volunteering between 2000 and 2001 can be
attributed to a decline in all conservation activity due to
controls on countryside access during the Foot and Mouth Disease
outbreak.
In broad terms, the type of work undertaken by volunteers falls
into four categories: countryside management; survey and data
input; administrative and office support; and ‘other conservation
volunteering’, which includes activities such as fundraising,
training and educational events. Work in all four categories has
risen between 2000 and 2010 (Figure 18 (ii)).
Figure 18 (ii). Volunteer time spent on biodiversity
conservation in selected UK conservation organisations, shown by
category of work, 2000-2010
Relevance
Volunteer time is one way of assessing the level of public
engagement with biodiversity. Volunteering for conservation
charities is critical to the successful delivery of many of the
objectives of the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (UKBAP) – for
example, volunteers collect much of the data used for monitoring
the status of priority species and also work to conserve threatened
habitats.
Background
The indicator is based on data on volunteer hours supplied by
the Bat Conservation Trust, Botanical Society of the British Isles,
British Waterways, British Trust for Conservation Volunteers,
British Trust for Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation, Exmoor
National Park, Lake District National Park, Loch Lomond and The
Trossachs National Park, North York Moors National Park,
Northumberland National Park, Peak District National Park,
Plantlife, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Soil
Association, the Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, and a public
body, Natural England.
Due to the inclusion of data from eight new organisations, this
year’s index is not comparable with the indices presented in
previous years. Some organisations were able to provide accurate
figures for number of hours worked, others provided estimates based
on the number of volunteers and the types of activity
undertaken.
Only the data provided by each of the organisations is given in the
downloadable data tables. Data were not available for all
organisations in all years. In previous years, the indicator has
omitted organisations without a full run of data because if
included, some years had more organisations contributing than
others – artificially inflating the figures in those years. For the
current indicator, missing values have been estimated by Defra
statisticians, by extrapolating from the figures provided. The
extrapolations were based on (a) the trend in the data provided by
the organisation with a gap in their records, and (b) the trend in
the data provided by other organisations for the missing years.
For this reason, and because of the differences in data quality,
the numbers of volunteer hours for the four categories were
converted to separate indices prior to combining them into one
overall index. The indicator therefore shows the increase in
relative rather than absolute number of hours worked by
volunteers.
Most organisations supplied data for calendar years, although
BTCV, Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, Northumberland
National Park, North Yorkshire Moors National Park , Peak District
National Park, and RSPB figures and the Natural England figures for
2008-9 and 2009-10 were broken down into financial years. Financial
year data were allocated to calendar years prior to indexing;
2009-10 data were allocated to 2009, and Defra estimates were
made for 2010.