scholarly journals Taking a more nuanced look at behavior change for demand reduction in the illegal wildlife trade

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Thomas‐Walters ◽  
Diogo Veríssimo ◽  
Erica Gadsby ◽  
David Roberts ◽  
Robert J. Smith
Geoforum ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 216-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared D. Margulies ◽  
Rebecca W.Y. Wong ◽  
Rosaleen Duffy

Diversity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Ada Sánchez-Mercado ◽  
José R. Ferrer-Paris ◽  
Jon Paul Rodríguez ◽  
José L. Tella

The order Psittaciformes is one of the most prevalent groups in the illegal wildlife trade. Efforts to understand this threat have focused on describing the elements of the trade itself: actors, extraction rates, and routes. However, the development of policy-oriented interventions also requires an understanding of how research aims and actions are distributed across the trade chain, regions, and species. We used an action-based approach to review documents published on illegal Psittaciformes trade at a global scale to analyze patterns in research aims and actions. Research increased exponentially in recent decades, recording 165 species from 46 genera, with an over representation of American and Australasian genera. Most of the research provided basic knowledge for the intermediary side of the trade chain. Aims such as the identification of network actors, zoonosis control, and aiding physical detection had numerous but scarcely cited documents (low growth rate), while behavior change had the highest growth rate. The Americas had the highest diversity of research aims, contributing with basic knowledge, implementation, and monitoring across the whole trade chain. Better understanding of the supply side dynamics in local markets, actor typology, and actor interactions are needed. Protecting areas, livelihood incentives, and legal substitutes are actions under-explored in parrots, while behavior change is emerging.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Thomas-Walters ◽  
Amy Hinsley ◽  
Daniel Bergin ◽  
Hunter Doughty ◽  
Sara Eppel ◽  
...  

The dominant approach to combating the illegal wildlife trade has traditionally been to restrict the supply of wildlife products. Yet conservationists increasingly recognise the importance of implementing demand-side interventions that target the end consumers in the trade chain. Their aim is to curb the consumption of wildlife or shift consumption to more sustainable alternatives. However, there are still considerable knowledge gaps in our understanding of the diversity of consumer motivations in the context of illegal wildlife trade, which includes hundreds of thousands of species, different uses, and diverse contexts. We developed a typology of common motivations held by wildlife consumers that can be used to inform conservation interventions, based upon consultation with multiple experts from a diversity of backgrounds, nationalities, and focal taxa. We identified five main motivational categories for wildlife use: experiential, social, functional, financial, and spiritual, each containing sub-categories. This framework is intended to facilitate more nuanced approaches to demand reduction, such as the tailoring of interventions—whether behaviour change campaigns, enforcement efforts, or incentive programmes—to the specific context in which they will be used. It is an important step towards producing a more systematic approach to designing demand reduction interventions that are more likely to succeed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Greenfield ◽  
Diogo Veríssimo

The illegal wildlife trade is a global threat to biodiversity as well as to public health and good governance. As legislation and law enforcement have been insufficient to protect many wildlife species, conservationists are increasingly focused on campaigns to help reduce demand for wildlife products. Social marketing is increasingly being used to support biodiversity conservation efforts, but the extent of its use has seldom been researched. Based on interviews with conservation practitioners, we assess the extent to which social marketing has been used in demand reduction campaign design. We do this by investigating the level to which demand reduction campaigns met the benchmarks defined by the UK’s National Social Marketing Centre. We focus on rhino horn and elephant ivory, two high-profile products in the illegal wildlife trade and in China and Vietnam given their role as key consumer countries. We also investigate how conservation practitioners view the opportunities and challenges of using social marketing in the context of reducing demand for illegally traded wildlife products. Our findings highlight that there are substantial gaps between best practice in social marketing and current practices in the design of demand reduction campaigns. However, several elements of social marketing are widely utilized and a platform exists from which to build more comprehensive behavioral influence campaigns in future. In terms of future needs, practitioners highlighted the need for independent consumer research upon which to build target audience insights, a focus on broader audience segments beyond the product consumers, and the improvement of collaborations across institutions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 17229-17234
Author(s):  
Yadav Ghimirey ◽  
Raju Acharya

We document trade of the Clouded Leopard Neofelis nebulosa in Nepal based on pelt seizure reports published in wildlife trade reports and in newspapers.  Just 27 cases in three decades seem little to suggest targeted illegal trade of the species, the seizure information in recent years indicate that illegal trade of Clouded Leopard body parts is still taking place.  Hence an in-depth assessment is necessary to understand properly the intensity and magnitude of illegal trade on Clouded Leopard in the country.


Author(s):  
Dan Yue ◽  
Zepeng Tong ◽  
Jianchi Tian ◽  
Yang Li ◽  
Linxiu Zhang ◽  
...  

The global illegal wildlife trade directly threatens biodiversity and leads to disease outbreaks and epidemics. In order to avoid the loss of endangered species and ensure public health security, it is necessary to intervene in illegal wildlife trade and promote public awareness of the need for wildlife conservation. Anthropomorphism is a basic and common psychological process in humans that plays a crucial role in determining how a person interacts with other non-human agents. Previous research indicates that anthropomorphizing nature entities through metaphors could increase individual behavioral intention of wildlife conservation. However, relatively little is known about the mechanism by which anthropomorphism influences behavioral intention and whether social context affects the effect of anthropomorphism. This research investigated the impact of negative emotions associated with a pandemic situation on the effectiveness of anthropomorphic strategies for wildlife conservation across two experimental studies. Experiment 1 recruited 245 college students online and asked them to read a combination of texts and pictures as anthropomorphic materials. The results indicated that anthropomorphic materials could increase participants’ empathy and decrease their wildlife product consumption intention. Experiment 2 recruited 140 college students online and they were required to read the same materials as experiment 1 after watching a video related to epidemics. The results showed that the effect of wildlife anthropomorphization vanished if participants’ negative emotion was aroused by the video. The present research provides experimental evidence that anthropomorphic strategies would be useful for boosting public support for wildlife conservation. However, policymakers and conservation organizations must be careful about the negative effects of the pandemic context, as the negative emotions produced by it seems to weaken the effectiveness of anthropomorphic strategies.


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