Strategizing Environmental Education and Communication: A Ten-Step Guide for Conservation Practitioners Based on Case Studies from Mongolia and Laos

Humankind is facing unprecedented challenges with climate change, biodiversity loss, water depletion, threats to the biosphere's integrity, nutrient cycle disruption, unsustainable land use, and chemical pollution, just to name a few.These changes negatively impact people's health, as well as the planet's.Considering these environmental threats, healing the connection between humans and nature is critical to ensure a healthy world.As UNESCO put it in its 2021 report Reimagining our Futures Together: A new social contract for education, "to change the course and imagine alternative futures, we urgently need to rebalance our relationship with each other, the living planet, and technology.We must learn our interdependencies and human place and agency in a more-than-human world" (UNESCO 2021, p. 57).IUCN's Nature 2030 Programme highlights in its 10-year strategic plan that "the future of life on earth depends on the choices we make and the way these decisions are implemented over the coming years.There is an urgent need for immediate action on a global scale.The need grows with every day that passes" (IUCN 2021, p. 2).Establishing conservation policies, regulations, and mechanisms is a process of social change.A well-designed education and communication strategy (EEC) will help manage the change effectively and efficiently.As outlined in chapters below, environmental communication comprises but is not limited to environmental education, both requiring specialist knowledge and experience.In a nutshell, environmental communication is the planned and strategic use of communication processes, social learning and media products to support effective policy making, public participation and project implementation geared towards environmental sustainability.It is a two-way social interaction process enabling relevant social groups to understand key environmental factors and their interdependencies, and to respond to related problems in a competent way.In light of inclusive and equitable environmental education, strategic communication is most important in relation to learning processes, capacity building, and inclusive participation.Speaking of the role of communication in conservation program management, the analogy to Liebig's Law of the Minimum on plant growth comes to mind: The yield is related to the one indispensable nutrient (light, water, fertilizers etc.) which is available in shortest supply (Sinclair and Park 1993).Applied to EEC this means that even the most sophisticated communication