Relationship between Environmental Values and the Evaluation of Watershed Conservation Plans that Benefit the Community Versus the Individual

Previous work has shown that human values can directly affect behavior and decision-making. Here, we investigated how the four human values thought to underlie environmental beliefs and behaviors (altruistic, biospheric, egoistic, and hedonic) were associated with user evaluations of conservation plans when the community’s whole watershed and the individual’s own sub-basin benefits were visualized via an environmental decision support system interface. These environmental values were measured with the environmental portrait values questionnaire (E-PVQ). Participants’ preferences for plans were characterized using a participant preference metric (PPM), equivalent to the gradient of participants’ ratings for a set of plans with the same whole watershed-scale benefits but dissimilar localized sub-basin-scale benefits. Results showed that participants’ evaluations of suggested conservation plans were influenced by both whole-watershed global benefits and sub-basin local benefits (ps<0.001). Participants’ evaluations of the suggested plans were significantly correlated with the altruistic and egoistic values (ps<0.05). In particular, participants with altruistic values were less influenced by sub-basin benefits, while participants with egoistic values were more influenced by sub-basin benefits regardless of benefits for the entire watershed. This research implies that considering both community and individual benefits is important in designing effective conservation plans, as they can each affect how participants evaluate conservation plans. Furthermore, taking environmental values into consideration might assist planners in designing plans that better align with people’s personal values and motivations, resulting in more effective engagement of individuals with diverse value orientations.