S.W. Reddy’s discussion of the islands where she carried out empirical research in the behavioral economics vein reminds of some fundamental similarities to Kerala, especially the fish and coconuts part. Thanks to the Nature Conservancy’s Cool Green Science for bringing this to our attention (if you do not have 15 minutes for the video now, save the text below for later reading):

Bringing Behavioral Insights into Conservation Programs and Policies

By Sheila Walsh Reddy

Behavioral science and economics have provided important insights for health, finance, and many other domains, but are largely untapped resources for conservation. A new paper in Conservation Letters helps practitioners tap into behavioral sciences.

Poverty and the environment are twin problems. We’ve realized that we need to solve them together. One solution we’ve tried is giving people ways to earn money that doesn’t hurt the environment.

Over the last decade or so, there has been a lot of interest in this type of thing—when I say that I mean that hundreds of millions of dollars has been spent on these programs worldwide. So it was really important to understand whether these programs were working…

Read the whole article here.