Shifting Baseline Syndrome and beyond: Addressing environmental misperceptions for nature recovery

Countries worldwide have collectively agreed to halt and reverse nature loss. However, a poorly understood and systemic challenge to this vision is Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS), wherein people misperceive the extent to which nature has been changed, with erosion of the baseline of what “good” nature looks like over time, either between generations or for an individual. This can diminish societal expectations for nature recovery. Here, we propose a framework that incorporates cognitive mechanisms underlying environmental misperceptions, broadening the conceptual framing of SBS to include other mechanisms behind misperceptions of environmental change, and including not just nature loss but also recovery. We demonstrate the utility of the framework using a mixed-methods study in Qunli New Town, Harbin, China, consisting of in-depth interviews (N=42) and a population-based quantitative survey (N=1018). Our results show that more accurate perception is associated with gaining information about an area from personal experience rather than indirect information sources. Cognitive errors, including errors of “omission” and “commission”, were related to the processes of sensation, attention, learning, thinking, and memory. Minimising SBS is important to ensure that people affected by environmental change are able to perceive it accurately, so that they can better respond to it; this is essential to pursuing resilient, sustainable, and inclusive societies under the Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity Framework.