Environmental Awareness Shapes How People Value Lake Ecosystem Services

How much is a lake worth? The question sounds like it belongs in an economics seminar, but the answer determines whether shorelines stay wild or fill with hotels, marinas and private beaches. At Lake Balaton in Hungary, the largest shallow lake in Central and Eastern Europe, researchers have now measured exactly how different groups of people value the services a lake provides, and the results carry a striking message: what people know about the environment shapes what they think the lake is for.

The study, published in the journal One Ecosystem, surveyed 1,500 respondents drawn from three groups with very different relationships to the water: permanent lakeshore residents, owners of vacation homes, and tourists visiting from across Hungary. Participants answered questions on the importance of various ecosystem services, the recreational activities they pursue, the types of shoreline they prefer, and their acceptance of potential future developments. When the researchers analyzed the responses, one variable outperformed all the usual socio-demographic suspects, including age, education, gender and income: the participants’ environmental awareness, measured as a composite score of their interest in environmental issues, their concern about pollution, and their views on threats to biodiversity.

The technical pattern in the data is revealing. Using principal component analysis, the team found that the first axis of variation in ecosystem service preferences, explaining 40.7 percent of the response pattern, correlated strongly with environmental awareness, with a correlation coefficient of 0.68. In plain terms, people who scored higher on environmental consciousness consistently assigned greater importance to regulating services such as water quality regulation and water retention, as well as to cultural services like aesthetic experience and quiet recreation. Provisioning services, such as reed as material or fish as food, clustered separately and were valued less overall. General linear models confirmed the effect, with environmental awareness the strongest and most significant factor at p < 0.001, followed by education, age and residency group.

This finding matters because regulating services are largely invisible to non-specialists. Unlike catching a fish or cutting reeds for thatching, processes such as water purification or shoreline protection by intact reed belts provide benefits that are difficult to observe directly. Previous research has suggested that people value what they can see and use. Yet at Lake Balaton, participants with greater environmental awareness recognized and appreciated these hidden functions. The researchers suggest that public debates over water quality, including algal blooms in 2019, may have enhanced awareness of the processes underlying water purification, illustrating what they call the context-dependency of how people value ecosystem services.

The survey also exposed sharp differences between stakeholder groups. Permanent residents appreciated ecosystem services in general the most, while tourists scored water quality and aesthetics as the most important services. Vacation homeowners valued quiet recreation opportunities highly but ranked angling as least important, a view they shared with tourists. Angling itself showed a bimodal distribution, with as many people considering it unimportant as considering it somewhat important, particularly among locals and tourists. Vacation homeowners, by contrast, more consistently ranked angling as important.

Recreational activities told a similar story about the lake’s actual use. The most frequent pursuits were bathing and swimming in the lake and walking along the lakeshore, all close-to-nature activities requiring little infrastructure. The least frequent were the high-profile, cost-intensive ones: sailing with larger sailboats, yachting, windsurfing and angling. Tourists undertook all activities most frequently during their stays, reflecting intense use of limited time. Women slightly preferred quiet activities while men leaned toward sailing and windsurfing. Time spent at the lakeshore correlated most strongly with activity patterns, at 0.54 with the first principal component axis, followed by education at 0.31.

Shoreline preferences followed a hump-backed distribution along a gradient of naturalness. The most preferred type was a close-to-natural shore, combining reed belts with sandy, unpaved beaches and little infrastructure, chosen by 24 percent of respondents as their top option. Fully pristine shores, where dense reeds limit access, scored much lower, as did heavily developed shores with paved promenades, kiosks and water attractions. The most disliked type, and an outstanding rejection, was the privatised resort shore: beaches closed to the general public and accessible only to hotel or resort guests. Thirty percent of respondents rejected this type outright, with another 25 percent disliking the most developed shore type. Locals strongly preferred natural shoreline types, while vacation homeowners showed the least pronounced preference for them.

When asked about potential future changes, respondents consistently favored more nature. The four most supported options were more forested areas, more shore promenades, more reed beds and more bicycle routes, with agreement ranging from 58 to 82 percent. The most disliked options were those imposing the greatest pressures on the lake: more marinas, more hotels and more yachts and large sailboats, rejected by 58 to 61 percent of respondents. Environmental awareness correlated strongly with preferences for more woody areas and more reeds, at 0.78 and 0.75 respectively on the second principal component axis. Notably, it was vacation homeowners, not permanent residents, who were most closely associated with support for touristic infrastructure development, despite their general opposition to intense development.

The researchers then mapped trade-offs between competing uses, defining them as ecosystem services or activities that are partly or completely mutually exclusive. Regulating services, such as water retention and purification, depend on undisturbed natural shores with intact reed belts and high biodiversity. Many aquatic sports, by contrast, require built infrastructure such as marinas, docks and stairs, along with removal of natural vegetation cover. Smaller modifications suffice for quiet activities like walking, bird watching and nature viewing, which can potentially be reconciled in a mosaic pattern with natural shore stretches. However, the authors caution that even quiet recreation can constitute a disturbance when undertaken by sheer numbers of people, meaning mass recreation might nevertheless impact conservation.

The policy implications are pointed. The broad public shows no appetite for high-profile development, and privatised resorts are outstandingly rejected. High-profile activities like yachting cater to visible but niche interests, contrasting with the broader appeal of quieter pursuits that align far more easily with conservation goals. Even seemingly minor recreational activities can damage ecosystems when crowds are large, so spatially explicit assessment of trade-offs is required. Where mass tourism collides with high nature value conservation areas, increasing environmental awareness is essential, and sustainable use of lakes affected by mass tourism can only be ensured through strong legislation and administration. With Lake Balaton attracting more than 2.5 million seasonal tourists each year, roughly ten times the local resident population of 250,000, plus 75,000 vacation homes in the region, the stakes are considerable. The lake, protected under the Natura 2000 network and the Ramsar Convention, has already suffered serious eutrophication in the past and remains sensitive to external pressures due to its elongated shape, long shoreline and comparatively small volume of 1.8 cubic kilometers.

The study’s broader significance lies in demonstrating that environmental awareness, not wealth or proximity, is the strongest explanatory factor in how people value nature’s services. This aligns with previous findings that ecological engagement, such as knowledge of invasive species, influences ecosystem service valuation, and that willingness to pay for restoration measures tracks environmental consciousness. As investment in large-scale hotel resort projects intensifies at lakes across Europe and around the globe, the Lake Balaton survey offers a template for eliciting public preferences before decisions are made. The authors argue that increasing environmental awareness and involving local communities in decisions that affect them is essential for arriving at just outcomes, noting that many development decisions around the lake are currently made excluding the public and disregarding long-term common interests. If environmental quality declines to a degree undesirable for most people, visitor numbers might decline in turn, a prospect worth reconsidering before the concrete is poured.

Subject of Research: Environmental awareness influences the perception of ecosystem services values at Lake Balaton, Hungary

Article Title: Environmental awareness influences the perception of ecosystem services values at Lake Balaton, Hungary

Article References: Vári, Á., Berecz, D., Fülöp, B., Honti, M., & Erős, T. (2026). Environmental awareness influences the perception of ecosystem services values at Lake Balaton, Hungary. One Ecosystem, 11, Article e174192. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.11.e174192

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.11.e174192

Keywords: Environmental, awareness, influences, perception, ecosystem, services, values, Lake, Balaton, Hungary, scientific research