The Conservation-Development Tradeoff: Evidence from China and the United States

• In Event: Attitudes About Climate Upheaval and the Development-Conservation Tradeoff

Abstract

The Conservation-Development Tradeoff in Environmental Politics: Comparative Evidence from China and the United States

The global hotspots of biodiversity loss overlap significantly with low-income communities in developing countries. There is often a tradeoff between biodiversity protection and economic development, since nature reserves usually disallow local communities from developing the land and resources. However, how publics and politicians respond to the “conservation-development” tradeoff has remained understudied. Previous polls on conservation policies only ask about public support for biodiversity conservation and (unsurprisingly) show very high support.
We conducted the first comparative survey study in China and the United States on how the two countries respond to the conservation-development tradeoff, which better reflects the policy dilemma in the real world. By randomly assigning our respondents to either the regular survey version (support for conservation policy in the abstract) or the tradeoff version (support for conservation policy conditional on the developmental tradeoff), we show the public is overwhelmingly more supportive of conservation in the abstract (support rate > 90%) than when they are aware of the tradeoff (support rate < 35%). Disaggregating the results, we also show that sensitivity to the conservation-development tradeoff is highly correlated with age, gender, and political attitudes. Our findings identify the extent to which public support for conservation might have been overestimated in the conventional wisdom, as well as the population segments for whom the conservative-development tradeoff resonates most.

Authors

• Mengqiao Wang, University of Hong Kong

• Kai Quek, University of Hong Kong