Reconnecting People to Nature Across Society to Shape the Future of Biodiversity

ABSTRACT Halting biodiversity loss will require transformative change across society, involving coordinated shifts in values, norms, and behaviors among diverse societal actors. Although this loss arises from multiple factors, personal and direct experiences of nature (hereafter, personalized ecologies) can play an important role in societal change. They shape how people perceive biodiversity and their willingness to support conservation. To date, however, the implications of personalized ecologies for the future of biodiversity have largely been explored in relation to the general public, with far less attention paid to their relevance across other societal sectors. Here, we synthesize existing evidence to examine how personalized ecologies among multiple societal actors (including direct natural resource users, business leaders, policy makers, citizens, educators, scientists, and journalists) can shape biodiversity outcomes. We show that, whilst the underlying psychological and cognitive mechanisms may be broadly similar across different actor groups, their effects are likely expressed through sector‐specific decisions and practices. Behavioral change in one actor group can propagate to others through interconnected social, economic, and institutional pathways, influencing biodiversity outcomes. In this sense, personalized ecologies can act as cross‐sectoral drivers of biodiversity change. However, their transformative potential is unlikely to be realized within a single actor group alone; synergistic increases across multiple societal sectors may be needed to generate mutually reinforcing effects that support biodiversity conservation. Strengthening engagement with nature across society, and counteracting the ongoing “extinction of experience”, may therefore play an important role in enabling transformative change towards biodiversity conservation and long‐term societal sustainability.