Should we prioritise people or nature? And under what conditions?

By William Hohnen-Ford, Research Assistant, Design Bioethics Lab

Balancing the needs of wildlife conservation with human development is one of the most pressing and complex challenges facing societies today. Decisions about land use often involve difficult trade-offs between protecting endangered species and supporting infrastructure, housing, or other human priorities.

Should a rainforest be preserved for endangered species, or cleared to build a dam that supplies electricity to nearby communities? Should thousands of families be relocated to create safe paths for migrating wildlife? Should human development take priority, especially when it can lift people out of poverty or provide essential services? Or should ecosystems and species be protected, even when that protection imposes real costs on human lives?

These aren’t hypothetical questions. All over the world, decisions about land use force difficult choices between protecting ecosystems and meeting human needs. In Indonesia’s Batang Toru rainforest, a planned hydropower project threatens to destroy the only known habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan. Supporters argue the dam will reduce carbon emissions. Critics warn it will push a critically endangered species to extinction. In India’s Nilgiris district, efforts to create corridors for elephant migration have displaced families with little warning or compensation. Development projects promise progress; but at what cost, and for whom?

Dilemmas like these are becoming more common. As the world faces accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and rising demand for housing, food, and infrastructure, public opinion will play an increasingly central role in shaping which futures are considered acceptable. Understanding those views, especially when they involve hard choices between competing goods, can help decision makers design policies that are not only effective, but also just and publicly legitimate.

In our recent study, we examined how the public navigates these trade-offs using a large-scale UK survey experiment and two US-based pilot studies. We asked 976 UK participants to make a series of difficult decisions, each involving a clear trade-off between conservation and development, for instance; choosing between a wildlife corridor and a railway station, or between a habitat for bumblebees and a water purification facility. By varying the kinds of species and land uses involved, along with the number of people potentially affected or the proportion of a species at risk, we were able to test which factors most influenced public support.

Our results showed a strong preference for preserving the status quo, regardless of what that status quo was. If land was already being used by humans, most participants wanted to keep it that way. If land was already protected as a habitat, they wanted to preserve it. In short, people were reluctant to support change, even when the alternative offered clear benefits. Furthermore, people are more likely to support conservation when they feel something important will be lost, especially if that something is rare, beautiful, intelligent, or ecologically vital. By contrast, support for development did not vary much depending on how many humans might benefit; whether a project would help 100 people or 10,000 made surprisingly little difference. Even when participants were told that conserving a habitat would save all remaining members of a species, or just a small fraction, support for conservation barely changed. This suggests people may be more sensitive to perceived losses, particularly of irreplaceable natural goods, than to large but abstract human gains.

These insights have important implications for policy. If we want public support for conservation or development, we need to understand the psychological forces behind people’s preferences. Loss aversion, perceived moral status of species, and the framing of land use all shape how people respond to difficult trade-offs.

You can explore these questions for yourself by playing Last Haven, a short interactive game based on our study. In it, you’ll face real-world dilemmas drawn from the kinds of trade-offs we’ve described here. Your choices help us understand how different people navigate these competing values, and what kind of future they believe is worth fighting for.

Play our Citizen Science game Last Haven here: https://last-haven.net

what do you think?

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Awad, E., Chen, S., Frater, J., Gomez, C., Hohnen-Ford, W., Lyreskog, D., Pulcu, E., Reinecke, M., Wilhelm, K., Zhu, H., Savulescu, J., & Singh, I. (2025). Public Views on Conservation-Development Trade-offs. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7062752/v1