Public support for restoration: Does including ecosystem services as a goal engage a different set of values and attitudes than biodiversity protection alone?

Though not a contrast between biodiversity protection and ES provision per se, a result reported in Raymond and Kenter [56] is also relevant to our present findings. Rural land man- agers in Australia were surveyed about their intention to plant native vegetation on their farms, a scenario that entails many of the same ecosystem service benefits as our BES scenario. They found that no value orientations directly predicted planting behavior, but biospheric concern indirectly influenced behavior via beliefs and norms. This suggests that among people already invested economically in the exploitation of their land for ecosystem goods, restoration of non-use value, or ecosystem services, is more associated with Biospheric values than Altruis- tic or Egoistic values. Together with our results, these findings collectively suggest that the commonly observed association between biospheric values and pro-preservation environmental attitudes applies best when the scenario considered by respondents is preservation of wild nature for the benefit of flora and fauna, with humans excluded. However, when intact ecosystems are anticipated to provide benefits that humans can enjoy, the biospheric orientation is less influential, and com- peting self-enhancing values or use-oriented attitudes can also explain people’s support for conservation. This lends support to the “big-tent” view that conservation efforts will benefit by drawing in support from nontraditional quarters with a more anthropocentric argument for habitat creation, restoration, and improvement.

An important caveat to this result is that it does not address the possibility that framing res- toration outcomes in terms of ecosystem services actually results in less support for restoration by crowding out moral, ethical, or cultural motivations for conservation [57–59]. Using an ES rationale will not result in increased support for restoration if the additional contributions of those who express self-enhancing values and attitudes (and are newly attracted by the ES fram- ing) are offset by the decreased contributions of individuals whose self-transcending values and attitudes are repelled by a focus on tangible human benefits. We did not design our study to directly answer this question, but two simple analyses from our dataset can shed some light on it. First, we can ask if the overall willingness to pay—the sum of all respondents’ answers to the WTP question—is lower in the BES scenario, which would suggest that overall outcomes for conservation were poorer under the ES frame. When we analyzed the data this way, we found that the sum of all respondents’ WTP was 20% higher in the BES scenario than the BO scenario. Second, we can ask if the BES scenario has higher rates of protest responses, which might occur if an ES framing was turning off more potential supporters than a biodiversity argument. In fact, we found that protest rates were significantly lower in the BES scenario. Therefore, we have no evidence that an ES rationale is crowding out traditional motivations for restoration support and resulting in poorer outcomes overall. Narloch and colleagues [60]

found that crowding out was most likely to occur in response to a payment-for-ecosystem-ser- vices cheme where there was strong pre-existing community cultural expectation of conserva- tion, but that “crowding in”—i.e., a “big tent” result—was possible where these conservation norms were initially weak. Our Australia-wide study, with its highly diverse and geographically dispersed participants, seems more likely to fit the latter scenario. Another caution in interpreting our results is that the BES and BO scenarios differed in other respects besides the presence or absence of ecosystem services. For instance, we cannot rule out the possibility that people with higher Egocentric value orientations or Utilizationist attitudes responded more positively to the BES scenario because of its proximity, familiarity, or place significance. The BES scenario shown was specific to the respondent’s region, while the BO scenario occurred in a location vaguely described as “offshore.” Also, the BES scenario concerned a woodland habitat whose flora and fauna might be more familiar or desirable to the respondent than the seabird rookery described in the BO scenario. People have different affinities for different habitats and landscapes [61–64] and proximity to the benefit is known PLOS ONE Values and attitudes towards biodiversity and ecosystem service goals of restoration PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245074 January 19, 2021 9 / 15