Toward urban wetland sustainability – a multivariate statistical analysis of encroachers' outlook

This paper explored the environmental outlooks of urban wetland encroachers, aimed at understanding this group of stakeholders and providing some evidence base for urban planning and environmental policy interventions. While the impact of encroachment and the poor management response have featured predominantly in literature, the awareness of encroachers of the services that the ecologically sensitive areas provide, their perspectives on policy effectiveness and how these relate to their environmental behaviours has not been given sufficient attention. We investigated the totality of environmental awareness, i.e., environmental attitudes, concern, knowledge and behavioural intention in relation to pro-environmental behaviour. It further interrogated the moderating role of perceived policy effectiveness between environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviour. Eight hypotheses were investigated, labelled H1 to H8, using Structural Equation Modelling and Hierarchical Regression Analysis. The findings reveal a complex interplay and sometimes counterintuitive relationship between the environmental constructs, i.e., environmental concern, knowledge, attitudes, and pro-environmental behaviour, highlighting both the potential and limitations of awareness-raising initiatives in driving behavioural change. We conclude that among the encroachers investigated, H1, H2 and H7 are supported, i.e., environmental concern and behavioural intentions were important drivers of pro-environmental behaviour, while also pointing that H4 and H6 were not supported, indicating environmental attitude and knowledge do not directly predict pro-environmental behaviour. We further conclude and suggest that perceived policy effectiveness of encroachers (H8) is contingent on effective policy enforcement, without which pro-environmental behaviour will not be triggered among these stakeholders. We suggest that intentions to promote environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviour should be interactive.