Changing Treescapes: Making visible the cultural values at risk from tree pests and diseases through arts approaches

TREESCAPES aims to develop and pilot a new Socially Engaged Arts method to extend the results of social science research from a previous UKRI project, UNPICK (Understanding public risk in relation to tree health), by taking it to new audiences, including multicultural groups. It also aims to enable further impact by engaging with policy makers in creative new ways to translate the UNPICK findings and the arts research to better incorporate consideration of wider cultural values in existing policy frameworks and landscape decision-making, risk assessment and risk communication about tree health.

The UNPICK project used a range of social science approaches to investigate how UK publics perceive, understand and make sense of the growing threat to tree health from invasive pests and diseases. Tree pest and disease epidemics have increased dramatically in recent decades, largely attributed to globalization, trade in plant material and wood packaging, human movement and climate change. Evidence suggests that these outbreaks are likely to have profound consequences on landscapes, and on ecosystem services and the wellbeing benefits provided by trees and woodlands. Policy and management for tree pests and disease generally rely on technical risk assessment techniques, supported by scientific evidence and economic analysis of so-called 'values at risk' to prioritise surveillance and action for preventing new incursions, detection of new outbreaks and management for control once a new pest becomes established. However, as findings from the UNPICK project suggest, there are likely to be broader social and cultural implications of pest outbreaks, including impacts on cultural values (including cultural ecosystem services), sense of place, wellbeing and place identity. Yet cultural values are rarely or only partially considered in decision-making, largely because they are often intangible, contextual and qualitative; and dialogue is often restricted to the policy-science interface, but rarely with societal stakeholders.

To address these issues, TREESCAPES will explore the potential role of arts research in revealing cultural values at risk from tree pests and diseases. Through a Socially Engaged Art approach it will take the learnings of the UNPICK project to new audiences, including black, Asian and minority ethnic groups (BAME), in conversations and actions that allow people to reflect on and express what places and landscapes mean to them, their attachments to those landscapes or elements within them and to make the unexpressed values of cultural treescapes explicit. By taking the project into the environments in which culture-nature interactions occur and engaging with people in their own setting, it will open up the possibility for deeper engagement with publics who may be unlikely to engage in more formal social science engagements, such as interviews or focus groups, and those who rarely or never engage with these issues.

A key capacity building objective will be to promote mutual learning about the role of the arts for tree health and landscape decision-making through interaction with those involved in policy making and practice in tree health. This will involve a creative World Café workshop with policy makers and practitioners to reflect on the challenges of blending outcomes from arts interventions with applied policy-relevant outcomes, specifically around a set of 'live' policy problems such as tree pest and disease outbreaks.

Outcomes will include a Policy Brief and a Creative Engagement Toolkit - a reflective document of the creative process and methods, which will act as a toolkit for creative engagement, to inform other researchers seeking to incorporate arts research into larger inter/trans/un-disciplinary work or communities of publics seeking to identify the cultural values in their local landscapes.

Policy makers and tree health practitioners, other researchers, case study communities and the researchers involved in the project will be beneficiaries of the project outcomes. Policy makers and tree health practitioners will benefit by gaining a better understanding of the cultural values at risk from tree pests and diseases, and insights into how arts approaches can inform more sustainable policy decisions and management practices that are sensitive to cultural values. Through its direct reference and application to live policy frameworks such as the Natural Capital Approach, the Policy Brief will provide a template for applying arts-informed cultural values into a mainstream policy framework, to ensure that such approaches don't simply deliver creativity in policy thinking that is in danger of being lost, but instead deliver meaningful evidence that can be retained alongside those revealed through scientific and social science methods. Other researchers will benefit from the Creative Engagement Toolkit, which will fill a knowledge-gap by providing guidance on how to appoint artists, and embed arts methods into their interdisciplinary research practice. The project team itself will benefit through interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts between disciplines, better equipping them to deliver high-quality interdisciplinary projects in the future. The case study community, particularly multicultural groups, will benefit by engaging with their environment in a new way, enabling them to express how they value those environments and what cultural values are at risk from invasive pests and diseases. The Creative Engagement Toolkit will provide tools for community stakeholders who wish to better understand the cultural value associated with environmental spaces or ecosystems in their neighbourhood. In addition, the novel public engagement through arts practice is likely to attract attention from regional and national media, as well as arts agencies and organisations, providing publicity to a set of publics beyond traditional academic and policy audiences.

The longer-term benefits of the project are likely to be in the adoption of arts insights into the policy making context, as well as wider use of arts methods in interdisciplinary research at the nature-culture interface. The project team anticipate that this project will act as a pilot study for a subsequent research project that scales up the activities to have wider geographical scope or to apply the method to a wider set of landscape characteristics or land-uses, such as identifying the cultural values attached to specific landscapes or landscapes at risk. Further, the stories created through this project could be translated through performance and taken to different communities around the country to engage/start conversations with a wider audience (e.g. including a Q&A with tree-health scientists post-performance).