Supporting Bank Australia customers for nature and climate
This MBI-led project with Bank Australia created a benchmarking survey and change model to understand customers’ openness to nature-positive action and what the roles banks can play in leading positive change.
Research Cluster
Research partners
Bank Australia, The University of Queensland, Mosaic Insights, RMIT
Project team
Dr Rachel Morgain, Dr Meghan Shaw, Professor Winnifred Louis (University of Queensland), Dr Matthew Selinske (RMIT), Professor Angela Dean (University of Queensland) Professor Sarah Bekessy (RMIT), Dr Emily Gregg (RMIT), A/Professor Fabio Mattioli, Dr Cynthia Sear, Professor Brendan Wintle
Contact
Melbourne Biodiversity Institute led a project for Bank Australia to understand the bank’s personal banking customers’ views, engagement and openness to action on nature and climate as part of their nature and biodiversity strategy.
Meg Shaw and Rachel Morgain led a partnership with researchers from University of Melbourne Critical Ethnography Lab, University of Queensland, RMIT and Mosaic Insights, co-designing research with Bank Australia. The research surveyed more than 2500 customers, and identified a majority customer base who care proactively about nature and biodiversity.
By finding that over 80% of customers support Bank Australia introducing more policies on nature and climate, Melbourne Biodiversity Institute has laid the groundwork for the bank to show leadership in the banking sector to transition to a nature-positive economy. We also assessed the most effective roles a bank can play to support and engage a personal banking customer base to act for nature and climate.
Other key findings included:
- Bank Australia customers are significantly more concerned about nature than the general public. Nearly half of customers (49%) rate the state of Australia’s environment as poor or very poor, compared to just 14% of the general public, indicating a more realistic and critical understanding of environmental decline.
- Customers show exceptionally strong connection to and care for nature. An overwhelming 93% of customers identify themselves as highly concerned about taking care of nature, with connection-to-nature indicators consistently exceeding national averages, including enjoyment of nature (96%) and feeling part of nature (83%).
- Awareness and concern are highest for climate change, pollution, and extinction.
Customers demonstrate very high awareness of major environmental threats—particularly pollution (91%), global warming (79%), and species extinction (72%)—and over 75% report being moderately or extremely concerned about all nature issues surveyed. - Customers are already acting for nature and are willing to do more. Most customers report current nature-positive behaviours, such as reducing water use (64%) and avoiding harmful chemicals (66%), while large majorities of those not yet engaged express willingness to adopt additional actions in the future, including volunteering and wildlife-friendly gardening.
- There is overwhelming support for stronger government and bank-led action on nature. At least 88% of customers support stronger environmental government policies, and over 84% support all tested bank policy initiatives, including ending funding for deforestation-linked developments and investing customer funds in conservation projects
Recommendations included implementing innovative policies, partnership programs, messaging and engaging diverse customer champions. Our research was presented to the leadership team and all employees.
The report is accessible here.