Conservation optimism and reckoning with the future

Article impact statement: The optimism permeating biological conservation should be recalibrated considering the future that present times portend.     

Special issue on contamination,remediation and health for pollutants in natural aquatic,soil, sediments and atmospheric environments

Environmental Geochemistry and Health -     

Efficacy-based and normative interventions for facilitating the diffusion of conservation behavior through social networks

Research suggests that encouraging motivated residents to reach out to others in their social network is an effective strategy for increasing the scale and speed of conservation action adoption. However, little is known about how to effectively encourage large numbers of residents to reach out to others about conservation causes. We examined the influence of normative and efficacy-based messaging at motivating residents to engage in and to encourage others to participate in native plant gardening in their community. To do so, we conducted a field experiment with messages on mailings and tracked native plant vouchers used. Efficacy messages tended to be more effective than normative messages at increasing residents’ willingness to reach out to others to encourage conservation action, as indicated by a several percentage point increase in native plant voucher use by residents’ friends and neighbors. Messages sometimes had different impacts on residents based on past behaviors and perceptions related to native plant gardening. Among these subgroups, efficacy and combined efficacy and norm messages most effectively encouraged individual and collective actions, as indicated by increased voucher usage. Our findings suggest that interventions that build residents’ efficacy for engaging in a conservation behavior and for reaching out to others may be a promising path forward for outreach. However, given our results were significant at a false discovery rate cutoff of 0.25 but not 0.05, more experimental trials are needed to determine the robustness of these trends.     

Understanding implications of consumer behavior for wildlife farming and sustainable wildlife trade

Unsustainable wildlife trade affects biodiversity and the livelihoods of communities dependent upon those resources. Wildlife farming has been proposed to promote sustainable trade, but characterizing markets and understanding consumer behavior remain neglected but essential steps in the design and evaluation of such operations. We used sea turtle trade in the Cayman Islands, where turtles have been farm raised for human consumption for almost 50 years, as a case study to explore consumer preferences toward wild‐sourced (illegal) and farmed (legal) products and potential conservation implications. Combining methods innovatively (including indirect questioning and choice experiments), we conducted a nationwide trade assessment through in‐person interviews from September to December 2014. Households were randomly selected using disproportionate stratified sampling, and responses were weighted based on district population size. We approached 597 individuals, of which 37 (6.2%) refused to participate. Although 30% of households had consumed turtle in the previous 12 months, the purchase and consumption of wild products was rare (e.g., 64–742 resident households consumed wild turtle meat [i.e., 0.3–3.5% of households] but represented a large threat to wild turtles in the area due to their reduced populations). Differences among groups of consumers were marked, as identified through choice experiments, and price and source of product played important roles in their decisions. Despite the long‐term practice of farming turtles, 13.5% of consumers showed a strong preference for wild products, which demonstrates the limitations of wildlife farming as a single tool for sustainable wildlife trade. By using a combination of indirect questioning, choice experiments, and sales data to investigate demand for wildlife products, we obtained insights about consumer behavior that can be used to develop conservation‐demand‐focused initiatives. Lack of data from long‐term social–ecological assessments hinders the evaluation of and learning from wildlife farming. This information is key to understanding under which conditions different interventions (e.g., bans, wildlife farming, social marketing) are likely to succeed.     

Mainstreaming human and large carnivore coexistence through institutional collaboration

Achieving coexistence between large carnivores and humans in human-dominated landscapes (HDLs) is a key challenge for societies globally. This challenge cannot be adequately met with the current sectoral approaches to HDL governance and an academic community largely dominated by disciplinary sectors. Academia (universities and other research institutions and organizations) should take a more active role in embracing societal challenges around conservation of large carnivores in HDLs by facilitating cross-sectoral cooperation to mainstream coexistence of humans and large carnivores. Drawing on lessons from populated regions of Europe, Asia, and South America with substantial densities of large carnivores, we suggest academia should better embrace the principles and methods of sustainability sciences and create institutional spaces for the implementation of transdisciplinary curricula and projects; reflect on research approaches (i.e., disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary) they apply and how their outcomes could aid leveraging institutional transformations for mainstreaming; and engage with various institutions and stakeholder groups to create novel institutional structures that can respond to multiple challenges of HDL management and human–large carnivore coexistence. Success in mainstreaming this coexistence in HDL will rest on the ability to think and act cooperatively. Such a conservation achievement, if realized, stands to have far-reaching benefits for people and biodiversity.