Revisiting the promise of conservation psychology

Abstract

Conservation psychology was first described as a field of research nearly 15 years ago (Saunders 2003) and such was the optimism for psychology to affect conservation that Saunders et al. (2006) published "Using Psychology to Save Biodiversity and Human Well-Being" in Conservation Biology. Conservation psychology developed as an offshoot from environmental psychology, a field that evolved from social psychology in the 1950s. Although environmental psychology is the study of people and their interactions with their environments, both built and natural, it initially did not address conservation matters. As conservation of biodiversity gained prominence, research into the psychological dimensions of conservation proliferated, and in 2003 the term conservation psychology was adopted to differentiate this field from environmental psychology. However, despite differences in scope, environmental psychology and conservation psychology are sometimes used interchangeably (Clayton & Saunders 2012).Managing human behavior is essential for biodiversity conservation. It is therefore timely to consider the uptake and impact of conservation psychology by examining how the publishing record in this field has changed over time and how its content relates to biodiversity. We performed a literature search via Web of Science (www.webofknowledge.com) for articles containing conservation psychology in keywords, abstracts, or titles. We found 68 articles published in peer-reviewed journals from January 2003 (the year the field was described) and December 2016. Six of these (8.8%) related to energy and water conservation-topics generally considered within the broader field of environmental psychology. * To capture further relevant papers that did not contain the term conservation psychology, we used the root terms: biodivers * AND (psycholog * OR "behavi * change"). This returned 155 relevant articles, of which 141 were unique to the additional search. Of the total relevant articles from the 2 searches (n = 203) (Fig. 1), 18.1% (37) were published in leading conservation journals, Conservation Biology (14), Ecological Economics (8), Biological Conservation (7), Conservation Letters (4), and Society and Natural Resources (4). Over the last 13 years, these 5 journals have published 12,880 articles. Our results suggest that only 0.28% of those are related to psychology. Although there are likely additional terms that could be used to explore the conservation psychology literature, our results indicate that despite perceptions of growth in conservation psychology, behavioral research has not yet penetrated mainstream conservation science. Additionally, only 5 articles in our search came from environmental psychology journals, Environment and Behavior and Journal of Environmental Psychology, which equates to just 0.36% of their output during the same period.Our results reveal that conservation psychology has not become an umbrella term for interdisciplinary research that integrates biodiversity conservation and psychology; although the number...

Achieving conservation impact by shifting focus from human attitudes to behaviors

“…The challenge therefore is identifying which proconservation behaviors should be prioritized for change (Selinske et al. ). Ultimately, future research must identify which behaviors can generate the maximum effect on biodiversity conservation.…”

“…There is significantly more research on conservation and human behavior with regard to energy and water conservation than on biodiversity conservation (Veríssimo ; Selinske et al. ). Positive outcomes for both conservation and communities can be better targeted by moving beyond simple indicators of community support such as attitudes to consider diverse behaviors and their diverse influences.…”

“…To corroborate our argument, we then took an approach used by Selinske et al. () to identify papers related to conservation psychology and biodiversity conservation. For the search terms “ biodivers * ” AND “ behavi * change ,” 65 articles were returned.…”

Identifying and prioritizing human behaviors that benefit biodiversity

“…These studies selected a subset of behaviors that addressed a specific conservation problem (e.g., cat predation of native animals) among a specific audience (e.g., cat owners in New Zealand). However, because the drivers of biodiversity loss are multiple, indirect, and vary spatially, temporally and among species and ecosystems, identifying the most impactful behaviors for a general population is challenging (Selinske et al, 2018). This challenge is further complicated by the overwhelming scale of the problem of human impact on biodiversity, rather than focusing on a specific species or biological community of interest (Maxim, Spangenberg, & O'Connor, 2009).…”

“…Estimating the exact effects of specific behaviors on biodiversity is inherently difficult because the threats to biodiversity are diverse, contextual, often difficult to quantify, and may have obscure links to the driving behaviors (Selinske et al, 2018). High impact biodiversity behaviors are behaviors that make a large difference to the persistence or conservation status of species and biodiversity (Clayton et al, 2013;Schultz, 2011).…”