What is the broad situation the EARTHFEST-Initiative is starting from?

Since the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 1992 the importance of public education and awareness has gained considerable attention, leading to the inclusion of the topic as article 13 into the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The German Federal Government implemented this focus into its National Strategy on Biological Diversity. The EARTHFEST-Initiative is particularly building on chapter B5 of the German National Biodiversity Strategy, where the importance of rising social awareness for biological diversity is emphasized. There the goal was set, that in 2015, the conservation of biological diversity should count as a priority task for at least 75 percent of the German population.

This goal has not been reached by far. This is confirmed in the latest edition (2015) of the Nature Awareness Study. According to the standards used, a “high awareness” for biodiversity is only found in about 25 per cent of all Germans. This is far from the goal of attaining 75 percent in that same year.

Obviously, a turnaround concerning the endangered biodiversity in Germany is only slowly taking place. The same is valid for the advance in social sustainability, a process which the German Advisory Council on Global Change has termed the “Great Transformation”. Both the latest Nature Awareness Study and the flagship report World in Transition – A Social Contract for Sustainability (2011) of the Advisory Council on Global Change show two things:

1. It is necessary to enhance the communication of nature awareness. In order to do this, it is particularly important to search for innovative forms of nature communication which are adapted to a life world increasingly functioning according to digital and technological principles.
2. In order to raise nature awareness and sustainability-oriented behavior it is important to focus on target groups in a more differentiated way than previously done. The action program “Offensive for the Protection of Nature 2020” invites all stakeholders in society to “accompany the official program with their own initiatives and to create their own access points”.

The EARTHFEST-Initiative connects here. In addition to raising nature awareness through discursive communication and cognitive knowledge our initiative also generates experienced-based knowledge. This creates new relations towards nature which are building on an emotional level. Our strategy follows the latest insights into brain research and cognitive psychology which show that in order to achieve changes in behavior, cognitive knowledge alone is not enough, but emotional relations are also needed. In a world which suffers from the decline of relatedness and the extinction of connection, EARTHFEST supports conscious ways of connecting as a default strategy to raise nature awareness and to support a sustainability-oriented practice of life.