The Problem
93 percent of global fisheries are overexploited. Climate change is bleaching coral reefs, and half of all coral reefs have disappeared since 1980. Millions of tons of plastic waste are harming sea life and causing systemic problems. And extinctions of marine creatures have never been higher. All ocean ailments share a common cause: human behavior. Our lifestyle choices—from the seafood we eat to the plastic packaging we use and the ways we consume energy—as well as the businesses and politicians we choose to support, impact ocean health. While political and corporate actions are necessary, we have seen time and again—such as with plastic straw and bag bans—that individual behaviors can lead the way by driving market forces and generating political will. The only real solutions for improving ocean health must derive from permanent changes in human behavior. Small, individual actions, such as minimizing plastic waste, reducing carbon emissions, and choosing sustainable seafood—can have profound impacts on global ocean health when taken to scale. Many well-documented approaches exist to convert awareness, motivation, knowledge, and skills into tangible action, and they have been applied successfully in a range of areas including public health (e.g. to promote weight loss or anti-smoking), commerce (marketing), personal finance, home-energy consumption, and others. Unfortunately, these approaches have not yet been widely applied to individual environmental behaviors.
Our Proposal
Nature-based tourism is a powerful and yet vastly underused platform for motivating behavior change. Research shows that it creates short term spikes in environmental knowledge, interest, and motivation that create a perfect opportunity for targeting behavioral outcomes. However, most travelers go home with nothing more than a memory, and tourism operators do little more than boost environmental awareness. Since 2014, Oceanic Society has worked to advance the science of behavior change and apply it to our travelers to strengthen our impact and develop a scalable methodology that can be adopted throughout the travel industry. In partnership with Stanford University, we have researched, designed, tested and piloted a methodology that draws on social science research, design-thinking, and technology to create systems that can change individual human behaviors with proven results. Our Blue Habits methodology is built upon knowledge of how people learn and what shapes our behaviors including social relationships, personal identity, and context. Blue Habits includes a suite of communication techniques and activities delivered by trained naturalists before, during, and after a nature tourism experience to ensure repetition of our messaging and to reach passengers at key moments of their overall experience. Our online portal extends the experience, reinforces desired behaviors, and connects individuals to a broader ocean-focused community.
We Assume that...
Tourists are willing to engage and adopt new behaviors. Field tests showed a high degree of engagement, especially when Blue Habits interventions are tied to gamification and “fun” activities.
Tourists will remain engaged for the long-term with post-trip management and incentives. We have seen expected rates of attrition and are working to improve long term stickiness.
Travel operators will be willing to partner with us. We have published a “business case” to highlight the advantages, e.g. revenue and opportunity bump from “green” marketing to their clients.
Constraints to Overcome
Myths that “awareness always leads to action” and “behavior change achieved only through education over time” hinder our ability to gain support. Experts agree that short-term spikes in awareness typically do not equate with long-term behavior changes due to the absence of effective pre- and post-intervention engagement. Blue Habits targets passengers before, during, and after a tourism experience and at key moments where it is most likely to influence behaviors, and we use science-based communication techniques. Another constraint is reaching a significant enough number of nature tourists to create a ground swell of action. We have begun with OS whale watchers (~3500/year [pre-COVID]), and are expanding to OS international expedition passengers (~500/year), and we intend to work with tour operators post-COVID to significantly increase these numbers to ~86,000 by 2022. We will also train naturalists to deliver Blue Habits interventions beyond OS travelers and select operator markets.
Current Work
Having piloted our Blue Habits methodology with OS's travelers, we now plan to scale the program by securing adoption by other travel operators and partners throughout the nature-based travel industry. We are working to scale our methods to whale watch operators in each of California’s 5 key whale watching regions as a bridge toward broader scaling among the global whale watch industry. We are also recruiting 1-2 travel operators for our longer, small group, expedition-style methodology in each of our 5 global geographies. Through these scaling steps, we aim to further refine our methods based on partner and traveler feedback before initiating a global rollout through trade shows, conferences, presentations, webinars, and more. Lastly, we seek to refine and enhance our online community portal prototype, working with developers to incorporate more interactive features for strengthened community interaction, communication, and discussion to reinforce pro-ocean actions and behaviors.
Current Needs
Hosting domestic and international virtual and site-based training workshops (COVID dependent) for naturalists and partners Website development and design for our online and community action portal – www.BlueHabits.org. We aim to spend the next 6 months building resources, digital content (photos, videos, blogs) and interactive features such as polls, quizzes, games, and avenues for interaction between fellow community members, to promote and reinforce ocean-friendly behaviors in four key areas: reducing plastic pollution; reducing carbon footprint; choosing sustainable seafood; and traveling sustainably. The portal will also incorporate the targeted messaging and communication techniques utilized within the Blue Habits methodology on our travel programs.