The role of social marketing, marine turtles and sustainable tourism in reducing plastic pollution

Abstract

Environmental plastic pollution constitutes a significant hazard to marine turtles, human health and well-being. We describe a transdisciplinary approach to draw together findings from diverse disciplines in order to highlight key environmental pollution problems and their consequences, together with social marketing-based strategies to address the problems. The example of plastic pollution and impacts to marine turtles illustrates the severity of the problem. Wildlife tourism and sustainable tourism activity have not focussed on specific behaviours to change and have had minimal impact on subsequent human behaviour regarding environmental issues, indicating the need for new strategies. Social marketing principles offer promise, but there is a need to investigate the utility of various theoretical foundations to aid the design and implementation of interventions. We offer insight towards using sophisticated multi-method research to develop insights into behaviours and segmentation-based strategies, that can aid the identification of barriers to, and enablers of, sustained behaviour change.