Abstract
AbstractThe conservation profession is increasingly seeking effective ways to reduce societal impact on biodiversity, including through targeted behavior change interventions. Multiple conservation behavior change programs exist, but there is also great uncertainty regarding which behaviors are most strategic to target. Behavioral prioritization is a tool that has been used effectively to support behavior change decision‐making in other environmental disciplines and more recently for a small sub‐set of biodiversity behavior change challenges. Here, we use behavioral prioritization to identify individual behaviors that could be modified to achieve biodiversity benefits in the state of Victoria, Australia. We use an adapted nominal group technique method to identify potential biodiversity behaviors and, for each behavior, estimate the corresponding plasticity (or capacity for change) and positive impact on biodiversity outcomes. We elicited 27 behaviors that individuals could undertake to benefit or reduce their negative impact on biodiversity. This list was then used to prioritize 10 behaviors as determined by their likely effect(s) on biodiversity, plasticity, and current prevalence in Victoria. We take a first step in outlining a list of behaviors that can direct Victorian decision‐makers toward increasing positive and reducing negative impacts of society on biodiversity, guide motivated individuals to reduce their own biodiversity footprint, and more broadly, develop a behavior change research agenda for behaviors most likely to benefit biodiversity.
Highlights
Human behavior is the major driver of biodiversity decline and extinction (Lenzen et al, 2012; Maxwell, Fuller, Brooks, & Watson, 2016; Driscoll et al, 2018)
All social behaviors fell into the lower right quadrant of behaviors: that is, easy to undertake but not highly impactful. This is likely due to the indirect links to biodiversity conservation outcomes, subsequent difficulty in measuring this impact, and the uncertainty about any actual impact, given that these actions require other individuals to change their behavior as a result of the social behavior
Our research demonstrates an initial stage of a behavioral prioritization process identifying the behaviors that have both high biodiversity impact and high plasticity in Victoria, Australia
Summary
Human behavior is the major driver of biodiversity decline and extinction (Lenzen et al, 2012; Maxwell, Fuller, Brooks, & Watson, 2016; Driscoll et al, 2018). Environmental behavior prioritization has been applied to zoos research (Smith, 2009; Smith, Weiler, Smith, & Dijk, 2012), energy conservation (Dietz, Gardner, Gilligan, Stern, & Vandenbergh, 2009), water conservation (Kneebone, Smith, & Fielding, 2017), and more recently to specific threats to biodiversity conservation (Linklater, Farnworth, Heezik, Stafford, & MacDonald, 2019; Please, Hine, Skoien, Phillips, & Jamieson, 2018) These prioritizations have all been executed differently, but follow a common process of: (a) identifying a candidate set of behaviors; (b) determining the impact of each behavior; (c) assessing the plasticity (or capacity for change) of each behavior; and (d) assessing the current prevalence of each behavior among the target population ( known as the “penetration rate”; Figure 1). Prevalence was estimated from a range of grey and peerreviewed literature
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