How Will Watching TV Help the Planet? New Study Shows Benefits of Nature Documentaries

According to a new paper, titled "Making a Greener Planet: Nature Documentaries Promote Plant Awareness" published in the Annals of Botany by Oxford University Press, watching TV, specifically viewing nature documentaries, increases people's interest in plants, potentially leading to involvement in botany and ecology.

Plant and Animal Species Awareness

In 2020, Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew released its State of the World's Plants and Fungi report which showed that an estimated 39.4% of plants are under threat of extinction. It is an increased rate from 25% in the 2016 report.

Researchers noted that the Earth may be losing plant species more quickly than science can find, name, and study. Experts said that it could have significant consequences in the search for resilient food crops in the face of climate change as well as new medicines.

Additionally, plants that are not directly useful for humans seem to be more vulnerable to other species. SciTech Daily reports that this is because humans do not recognize their importance due to plant bias called "plant blindness" or a disparity in plant awareness.

Whereas endangered species of animals are given emphasis in conservation, threats to plants are challenging to recognize and address. For instance, plants in the US only receive less than 4% of federal funding for endangered species even though it comprises 57% of all endangered species on the list.

Watching Nature Documentaries Provoke Involvement in the Environment

Researchers of the new study said that several natural history productions made viewers much more aware of animals in their shows. Scientists may not clearly create a direct correlation between watching TV shows like Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, Seven Worlds, and One Planet, but they think nature documentaries are a way to raise awareness about the environment and engage people.

As per the press release, the team investigated how watching nature documentaries promote plant awareness that may lead to increased engagement in plant conservation programs. They investigated how the 2022 BBC documentary Green Planet narrated by Sir David Attenborough will affect the 5 million audiences in the UK who watched it.

The documentary featured a diversity of plant species and highlighted vegetation, such as tropical rainforests, aquatic environments, seasonal lands, deserts, and urban spaces. More so, it tackled recent environmental concerns and examined the dangers of deforestation and invasive monocultures.

To measure how it drove interest, the team looked at people's online behavior at the time of the broadcast. They noted which species appeared in the documentary and extracted data from Google Trends and Wikipedia on those same species before and after the documentary aired.

They found that it increased interest in plant species, wherein 28.1% represents plants mentioned in Green Planet had significantly peaked in the UK in Google Trends after a week the relevant episode was broadcast. Wikipedia also showed that 31.3% of hits related to plants in the documentary received increased traffic a week after the broadcast.

Researchers said that people who were more likely to do online searches for plants enjoyed more screen time in the documentary. Joanna Kacprzyk, the lead author of the paper, said that increasing public awareness of plants is essential and fascinating as it shows that nature documentaries can indeed increase plant awareness.