Thinking Globally But Not Acting Locally?: Expert and Public Perceptions of Environmental Threats and Conservation Actions

Abstract

One solution to mitigate conservation threats is to harness the collective impact of individuals changing their behavior. Due to limited resources, it is necessary to identify high impact behaviors to target in future advocacy campaigns. In this article, we followed a systematic process and asked environmental specialists and zoo visitors to list the top three global and local wildlife conservation threats and the corresponding behaviors to mitigate the threats. Visitor perceptions, unlike those of experts, were biased toward global threats with less awareness of local threats. For addressing global threats, both visitors and experts listed individual-based actions. At the local scale, experts focused on behaviors implemented by government and large organizations while visitors listed individual-based actions. Future research and advocacy campaigns will need to address the expert bias toward government and large organization–based behaviors at the local scale and visitor bias toward global threats and behaviors.