The loss of biodiversity is influenced by the choices we consciously make, individually and collectively, on a daily basis. Given the importance of this issue and the absence of an expert group focused on influencing human behaviour, the IUCN through its Commissions for Species Survival and Education and Communication created a Behaviour Change Task Force in May 2023. Details can be found at conservationbehaviourchange.org/en.

Although there is a long history in biodiversity conservation of trying to influence decision-making through environmental education, the social, communication and behavioural sciences have often been overlooked as tools for nature protection. The Behaviour Change Task Force will focus on distilling multidisciplinary evidence and providing specialist knowledge in support of the IUCN network and the conservation field more broadly. It aims to produce a series of guidance materials to disseminate best practices in the field of behaviour change for biodiversity conservation. The outputs of the Task Force will provide guidance to other interested groups, both within the IUCN network (such as Species Survival Commission species specialist groups) and beyond IUCN (such as the community of zoo and aquarium educators). More broadly, the Task Force aims to leverage the IUCN brand alongside its membership to increase the use of behavioural insights to advance the conservation and management of biodiversity.

The Behaviour Change Task Force will benefit from its members’ varied backgrounds in behavioural, social and communication sciences. This gender-balanced group includes professionals from North and Latin America, Oceania, Africa, Europe and Asia. With expertise across fields such as psychology, social marketing, communications, economics, social marketing, behavioural public policy, environmental policy, education and design thinking, the Task Force aims to be transdisciplinary.

The main goal of the Task Force is to act as a knowledge broker between the behavioural sciences and those working to conserve biodiversity. To achieve that, this Task Force will: (1) maximize synergies between other institutional groups working in the field of behavioural science and sustainability, (2) conduct a consultation across the two Commissions and other relevant stakeholders to identify barriers to the use of behavioural change science in conservation, (3) publish guidelines for high quality behavioural interventions in the context of biodiversity conservation, (4) develop freely accessible training materials and modules to help build capacity across the IUCN and more broadly in biodiversity conservation, and (5) produce an authoritative open access review of the relevant knowledge in this field. The aim is to fulfill these goals by the next World Conservation Congress in 2025.