Can reading an IUCN report on palm oil shift conservation perspectives?

A new study involving 470 conservation professionals from 90 countries sought to answer this question. Researchers surveyed respondents before and after they read a comprehensive IUCN synthesis report on oil palm and biodiversity. The findings offer new insights into the role that knowledge and experience play in shaping perceptions, the limits of knowledge transfer, and the benefits of synthesis reports including IUCN publications.

Diverging Views on Solutions

One of the study’s most striking findings was the diversity of views on conservation interventions. While there was a broad agreement on environmental impacts, respondents tended to hold relatively more polarised beliefs about the effectiveness of interventions like voluntary certification, trade regulation, and jurisdictional approaches.

The researchers found that respondents often rated conservation interventions like corporate zero deforestation commitments that had not yet been assessed by the scientific literature. They also frequently scored such less-tested strategies as more effective than those, like voluntary sustainability certification and public protected areas, backed up by published evidence for effectiveness. The authors caution that, “this may reflect the knee-jerk nature of conservation policy, where novel interventions receive more attention than well-tested ones.”

Perceptions appeared to be more influenced by respondents’ background and information sources than by the report itself. For example, professionals with more experience working on palm oil issues or who self-reported greater knowledge of the economic impacts of the palm oil industry were more likely to view certain conservation interventions as effective and less likely to support a hypothetical trade ban on palm oil imports.

Implications for Conservation Communication

The study’s implications go beyond palm oil. The findings raise important questions about how IUCN and other conservation organisations should communicate synthesised evidence with diverse community members. Even if open-access synthesis reports, like the one assessed in this study, do not change deeply held beliefs, they remain valuable tools for distilling complex scientific information. These types of reports can reduce the time and cost needed to understand large literature and identify knowledge gaps for further research efforts.

This underscores the need for more interactive forms of communication tailored for specific audiences. Promoting two-way engagement, such as co-designed research, stakeholder workshops, and iterative dialogues may enhance written reports and help bridge the persistent science–practice gap in conservation.

The Value of Experience

The study’s findings suggest that conservation organisations should pay closer attention to how their teams engage with commodities like palm oil. The researchers report that individuals with field experience or long-term sector exposure held views distinct from respondents without these characteristics. As the authors recommend, conservation organisations could benefit from “prioritising sending staff to the field… and hiring individuals with long-term lived experience” to complement scientific knowledge garnered from sources like workshops and peer-reviewed publications.

In a conservation landscape marked by complexity and competing priorities, understanding how evidence shapes professional perspectives is critical. This study reminds us that while evidence matters, how it is delivered, and who interprets it, matter just as much.