Messaging matters: improving conservation outcomes through strategic communication
Creators: name: Kidd, Lindall
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 410401
subject: Conservation and biodiversity

description: Biodiversity conservation is a complex endeavour that involves stakeholders across political boundaries and across myriad cultural and socioeconomic groups. Given that key threats to biodiversity are the result of human actions, reversing the decline of biodiversity will require human behaviour changes at the level of individuals and society. Despite presenting an existential risk to human society, biodiversity continues to decline because conservation behaviours are not well understood or implemented.

Behaviour change interventions almost always require communication to engage their intended audiences. As such, effective communication approaches that elicit beneficial behaviour change for biodiversity are crucial for ongoing conservation success. This thesis seeks to understand how to design effective conservation communications, drawing on existing frameworks and theory from the fields of behavioural science and communications. To do this, I specifically: identify the characteristics that might increase the popularity of threatened species online; assess the current state of conservation messaging through a systematic literature review; assess evidence for the effectiveness of the most common way of communicating about biodiversity loss; empirically test the effectiveness of different conservation messages; and, examine the broad social narrative surrounding the extinction crisis through a media analysis.

I first investigate how people are engaging with threatened Australian fauna on social media and show that many of Australia’s threatened species receive little or no attention online; more than half of Australia’s threatened species have been the subject of tweets fewer than 20 times in a decade. I identify characteristics that might increase the popularity of threatened species online. Given that a lack of public interest was highlighted as a key factor contributing to the recent extinction of two Australian species, these findings have broad implications for the social marketing of Australia’s threatened fauna.

Next, through a systematic review of the literature, I investigate whether conservation messaging research addresses key elements of design and theory from other disciplines. Key findings from this review suggest that conservation studies often use a "one-size-fits-all" approach without carefully identifying a target audience, and often aim to increase education and awareness, despite evidence that this type of communication may not lead to behavioural change. In consideration of these findings, I suggest a framework to improve conservation messaging that incorporates knowledge from behavioural science and communications.

Drawing on the recommendations from the second chapter, the next chapters review the evidence for the most common way of communicating about biodiversity loss, which is to use a negative message frame. I review the literature to gather empirical evidence across disciplines for the effectiveness of optimistic or pessimistic message frames for changing behaviour. This review highlights that conservation scientists are not appropriately drawing on existing evidence from other disciplines, and many existing calls for either an optimistic or pessimistic communication approach are not based on empirical evidence. A notable oversight is that self-efficacy—the sense of power that people have to influence their own actions—is often not considered in conservation messaging.

To explore the influence of self-efficacy and the behavioural pathways that might encourage people to act after exposure to a conservation message, I ran a survey-based experiment to test the effectiveness of positive and negative conservation message frames with or without a suggested action. Linear regression and structured equation modelling showed that negative message frames elicited greater behavioural intent than positive frames and that including an action statement about what people can do to prevent biodiversity loss increases people's conservation behavioural intent.

Finally, given the importance of including an action when talking about conservation to encourage behavioural change, I investigate the broad social narrative surrounding the extinction crisis through an analysis of mass media articles. I examine whether news articles are framed in a negative or positive way, and whether/how they communicate the need for human actions to reverse the decline of biodiversity following release of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report, which detailed that millions of species worldwide are threatened with extinction. The majority of news articles following release of the report were negatively framed. No articles mentioned any time frame for the possible recovery of nature, potentially further perpetuating a negative societal frame where the outcome of extinction seems inevitable. Just over half of reviewed articles mentioned actions that could be taken to stop the biodiversity crisis, with the majority of actions targeted towards broad- scale policy change. It is well established that when communicating threatening issues, actions should be included to increase peoples’ feelings of efficacy; yet only ten percent of reviewed media coverage mentioned actions that individuals could undertake to stop biodiversity loss.

This thesis highlights the need for a more strategic approach to conservation communications. I outline a framework within which conservation scientists can more strategically prepare their communications, test the effectiveness of common conservation communication approaches and identify existing knowledge gaps to set priorities for future research. More broadly, this research contributes to the development of effective conservation communications that can encourage behavioural change required to reverse the extinction crisis.