Landholders’ intentions to engage in private land conservation agreements under climate risk
Private landholders are central to biodiversity conservation, yet little is known about how climate‑driven extreme‑weather experiences shape willingness to adopt conservation covenants. Using protection‑motivation theory and survey data from 294 landholders in New South Wales, this study shows that beliefs in covenant effectiveness and perceived severity of future droughts, floods and bushfires strongly predict adoption intentions. Severity perceptions also mediate the influence of extreme‑weather experiences and environmental values, with flood and bushfire models showing event‑specific pathways. Financial incentives and land characteristics had no significant effect. Integrating landholder perceptions into policy design can strengthen the resilience and long‑term success of private land conservation under climate change.
Subject Tags
- Land management
- Climate adaptation
- Policy
Abstract
Private landholders play a critical role in global biodiversity conservation as they manage significant portions of land in many countries. Understanding the motivations and barriers related to landholders' uptake of formal conservation agreements, such as conservation covenants, is essential for scaling up and prioritizing investment in biodiversity conservation. However, we currently have a limited understanding of how landholders' experiences and perceptions of past and future threats from extreme weather events relate to intentions to adopt conservation covenants. Knowledge of this is likely to be critical for designing private land conservation programs under climate change. To address this, we applied a protection motivation theory to explore whether the experience of extreme weather events (i.e., drought, bushfire and flood) and climate change risk perceptions predicted stated intentions to adopt conservation covenants. Using a survey of landholders in New South Wales, Australia (N = 294), multivariate structural equation models were run, each tailored to a specific extreme weather event as well as a model combining all events. We found that landholders' beliefs in the effectiveness of conservation covenants (response efficacy belief) and their perceptions of the severity of future extreme weather events were positively and significantly related to their likelihood to adopt conservation covenants. Moreover, the perceived severity of extreme weather events mediated the effect of the extreme weather event experience and environmental values on landholders' stated adoption intentions. In the event-specific models, flood severity perceptions mediated participants’ experience of flood on covenant adoption intentions, while bushfire severity perceptions significantly mediated the impact of environmental values on adoption intentions. Conversely, no mediation effects were observed in the drought model. Financial incentives, past conservation behaviour, conservation or land management network membership, and land characteristics did not significantly predict conservation covenant adoption intentions. Drawing from these findings, integrating landholder perceptions and experiences of extreme weather events into the design of private land conservation policies and programs is likely to improve the long-term resilience of private land conservation initiatives.
Citation
Budhathoki, N. K., Fielding, K. S., Rhodes, J. R., Archibald, C. L., Lunney, D., Brazil-Boast, J., ... & Iftekhar, M. S. (2025). Landholders’ intentions to engage in private land conservation agreements under climate risk. Journal of Environmental Management, 377, 124483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2025.124483
TNC Authors
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James A. Fitzsimons
Senior Advisor, Global Protection Strategies
The Nature Conservancy
Email: jfitzsimons@tnc.org