Behaviour Change Science in Conservation
JK
In conservation and climate contexts, behaviour change is often treated as a communication problem i.e. if people understood the issue better, they would act differently. However, decades of evidence show that awareness alone is rarely sufficient. Many environmental campaigns remain grounded in outdated models of science communication that assume a linear pathway from information to attitude to action. As a result, campaign impacts are frequently limited to increased awareness or change attitudes with little evidence of sustained or scalable behaviour change. However it is too simplistic to assume attitude change is a prerequisite for behaviour change. Some interventions may even be ineffective or counterproductive—triggering resistance, moral licensing, or disengagement.
To date, relatively little behavioural science has been meaningfully translated into conservation research, policy, or practice. Where it has, the focus has often remained at the individual level, overlooking the social and systemic drivers of environmentally harmful behaviour. This gap highlights the need to better integrate insights from disciplines that study how people process information, make decisions, influence one another, make decisions and ultimately act (i.e. behave) based on these premises. All behaviour is preceded by any number of intrinsic and external factors that influences at both individual and systems level:
- Knowledge
- Competence
- Motivation
- Intentions
- Identity
- Autonomy
- Agency
- Emotion
- Connection
- Relatedness
- Attitudes
- Beliefs
- Values
- Perceived threats
- Habits
- Decisions
- Choice
- Personal norms
- Self-control
- Social Influence
- Social Norms
- Tradeoffs
- Priorities
- Perceptions
- Environment
- Infrastructure
- Access
- Context
- Community Norms
- Social Systems
- Regulations
- Policies
As with many behaviours all of the factors listed here can be the key to unlocking behaviour, can be bypassed or can act as obstacles to overcome. We know even with the best intentions and values – we often do not convert these into action and continuously respond to our environment in a continuous cycle of trade-offs. It is hard to be consistent cross behaviours settings and we are very influences by others and the material world!
Behaviour Change Science offers conservation and climate campaigns a way to move beyond awareness-raising towards enabling action. It supports the design of interventions that align with real-world constraints, address social and cultural norms, and reshape the systems that make nature-positive behaviours easier, more attractive, and more normal. It also strengthens the translation of conservation evidence into policy and practice, improving the likelihood that interventions lead to durable change rather than short-lived engagement.
In this way, Behaviour Change Science reframes conservation not simply as a problem of knowledge deficits, but as a challenge of designing social, institutional, and environmental conditions in which biodiversity-friendly and climate-positive behaviours can take root and spread. “Human behaviour drives all substantive threats to biodiversity; therefore, influencing it is the only path to mitigating the current extinction crisis. However, lack of expertise can mean efforts may be misguided, behaviour change strategies at best ineffective, and at worst lead to potentially harmful effects that undermine targeted outcomes.” IUCN Task Force.