Conserve the planet, not empathy! Revising the empathy conservation framework

In this chapter we discuss the four main areas of environmental economics - air, energy, waste and water - with a focus on conservation. For each area, we summarise the key insights learned for conservation behaviour from studies on behavioural biases, social norms and other-regarding preferences. While a lot of literature on encouraging conservation is devoted to social norms, biases and other-regarding preferences have received relatively little attention so far. Based on our analysis we revise our empathy conservation framework (Czap et al. 2018) to include biases, reputation and signalling. We posit that encouraging individuals towards empathy conservation requires an understanding of the complexity of motivations and external influences. It also demands a fundamental shift in environmental policy and societal expectations regarding conservation behaviour away from the short-run materialistic focus on consumption and automatically green/green-by-default behaviour towards the empathy-driven conscious and voluntary focus on environmental sustainability in the long run.