Eliciting diverse perspectives to prioritize community actions for biodiversity conservation

Abstract

Communities have a strong role in protecting biodiversity. In addition to participation in restoration, a range of actions in the public or private sphere may support biodiversity. Despite this, there is a lack of clarity about what actions should be prioritized for behavior change campaigns. We developed and applied a method to prioritize community actions for biodiversity conservation that incorporates an expert‐based assessment of impact and a community‐informed measure of the likelihood of uptake. In stage 1, experts (n = 143) completed a survey that quantified the relative impact of actions based on best–worst scaling of perceived impact. In stage 2, surveyed community members (n = 3200) ranked the likelihood of adopting actions based on the ease or difficulty of performing each action, and the opportunity for change based on the proportion of respondents not yet engaging in each behavior. Experts gave the following actions the highest ranking for impact: voting for the environment (first), participating in restoration in ecological priority areas (second), and purchasing and protecting remnant bushland (third). When considering the disciplinary background and institutional background of experts, voting and participating in restoration activities remained in the upper ranked options. However, there was some divergence between these groups. For example, reducing beef consumption was ranked third by university‐based experts but ranked 28th by experts based in state government. Overall, community members ranked the following behaviors as most likely to be adopted: following quarantine laws (first), reducing plastic use (second), and managing pets (third). Top likelihood ranking of actions was minimally affected by community characteristics (nature relatedness, gender, location). Integrating these findings, the action ranked most favorably for impact, likelihood, and opportunity was participating in restoration. Choosing actions for behavior change campaigns requires consideration of the entire social–ecological system—from social factors that enable or constrain adoption to the ecological impact of actions across relevant social and ecological contexts.