Motivating sustainable behaviors by framing biodiversity loss as a public health risk

Earth’s biodiversity is being lost at an alarming rate. Researchers have consistently underscored the need to conserve biodiversity not only for the sake of the environment, but also to safeguard human health itself. Biodiversity loss is a chronic, largely abstract risk that is difficult for people to visualize tangibly. This can limit what people think they can do to help conserve it. However, experts regularly implore the wider adoption of more sustainable behaviors because these are linked to both conserving biodiversity and improving the long-term quality of human life. This study centrally examines whether framing the risk of biodiversity loss in terms of its impacts on human health can persuade people to adopt recommended sustainable behaviors to protect themselves against its harmful effects on their health. A survey-based experiment testing the effect of risk-framed messages found that low-risk messages were associated with higher risk perceptions, fear, efficacy, and protection motivation than high-risk messages. The primary contribution of this study is the mapping of causal pathways between factors in the protection motivation model in the context of a chronic, global environmental and health risk. A moderated serial mediation analysis demonstrates how risk perceptions, fear, response and self-efficacy, maladaptive rewards, and response costs influence intentions to adopt sustainable behaviors. In exploring the effects of efficacy independent of the coping appraisal additive, findings show that efficacy moderates the impact of risk perceptions on fear, and coping appraisal moderates the impact of fear on protection motivation. A broader conceptualization of efficacy and implications for sustainability campaigns, practice, and future research are discussed.