The study, led by Aya Takagi, associate professor at Yokohama National University’s Faculty of Environment and Information Sciences, together with co-author Ryosuke Nakadai, a lecturer in the same faculty, set out to answer a question that has long puzzled environmental social scientists: why does support for climate action vary so widely in societies where the underlying science is broadly accepted? In Japan, skepticism about the reality of human-caused climate change is relatively rare, and yet enthusiasm for concrete climate measures differs markedly across the population. That gap suggested to the researchers that scientific understanding alone could not explain the politics of environmental policy — that cultural worldviews and personal relationships with nature might be doing substantial work beneath the surface.

In June 2025, the team surveyed 1,133 people across Japan, measuring four distinct dimensions: their cultural worldviews, their values regarding nature, their perceptions of environmental risks, and their support for different categories of environmental policy. The policy categories were deliberately separated into three groups: measures explicitly identified with climate change, biodiversity conservation measures that are related to climate change, and stand-alone biodiversity conservation measures with no explicit climate framing. This design allowed the researchers to isolate whether cultural divisions attach to the substance of environmental protection or to the label of climate change itself.

The results were strikingly asymmetric. Cultural worldviews mattered most, by a considerable margin, when the policy in question was framed as climate change. Respondents with more hierarchical worldviews — people who are more comfortable with stratified rather than egalitarian social relations — tended to perceive climate change as less risky and expressed notably weaker support for climate change measures compared with respondents holding more egalitarian views. This pattern echoes a large body of research, much of it from the United States and other politically polarized countries, showing that hierarchical and individualistic worldviews are associated with diminished climate concern. What makes the Japanese data remarkable is what happened when the policy subject shifted.

When respondents were asked about biodiversity conservation measures that are related to climate change, the negative association with hierarchical worldviews became considerably weaker. And for stand-alone biodiversity conservation measures — policies with no explicit connection to climate change — the researchers found no clear direct association between hierarchical worldview and policy support at all. In other words, the cultural fault lines that cleave public opinion on climate policy largely dissolve when the conversation turns to protecting species, ecosystems, and the natural world on its own terms. Support for conservation, it appears, is not distributed along the same cultural gradients that structure climate attitudes.

The findings point to a potential strategic advantage for biodiversity conservation as a prominent component of climate policy. Framing environmental action around conservation goals may allow governments and advocates to build coalitions that transcend the worldview-based divisions that often stall climate legislation. However, Takagi and Nakadai are careful to draw the boundaries of what their data can support. The policies examined in the survey were substantively different measures, not the same policy wearing different rhetorical costumes, and the study identified associations rather than causal relationships. The results do not mean, the researchers caution, that a contentious climate policy could simply be repackaged as biodiversity conservation and thereby become popular. What the data show is that, in Japan at present, conservation policies occupy cultural common ground that climate-labeled policies do not.

The study also identified a second and arguably more universal source of agreement: relational values of nature. This concept refers to the personal and cultural connections people hold with the natural world — the sense of identity, responsibility, attachment, and reciprocity that shapes how individuals relate to landscapes, wildlife, and ecosystems. Across the entire sample, participants with stronger relational values expressed greater support for all three types of environmental policy examined, including explicitly climate-focused measures. Relational values, unlike cultural worldviews, appeared to operate as a unifying force rather than a dividing one, cutting across the social orientations that otherwise fragment environmental opinion.

General scientific knowledge also played a role, though a selective one. Respondents with higher levels of general scientific understanding were more supportive of biodiversity conservation measures, including those related to climate change. Notably, the survey did not find knowledge to be the decisive factor in climate policy support, reinforcing the study’s central lesson: what people know matters, but how they see society and what nature means to them may matter more. For science communicators, this suggests that facts alone are an incomplete instrument, and that appeals rooted in people’s lived and cultural relationships with nature may travel further than arguments centered on abstract planetary risk.

The research team now plans to move from observation to experiment. By presenting identical policies with different framings while holding their substance constant, future studies could determine whether framing itself alters the influence of cultural worldviews on policy support — a question the current correlational design cannot answer. The team also hopes to replicate the findings in countries where environmental issues are far more politically polarized than in Japan, including the United States, and to extend the analytical approach to other contested policy domains such as health and food security. If the pattern holds broadly, it could reshape how governments sequence and package environmental legislation in an era of tight political margins.

“Our ultimate goal is to help design climate and biodiversity policies — and ways of communicating them — that can earn broad public support without deepening social division,” Nakadai said. In a decade defined by both accelerating ecological loss and hardening political polarization, the Japanese survey offers a deceptively simple insight with potentially far-reaching consequences: the fastest route to collective climate action may run through the birds, forests, and oceans that people across the cultural spectrum already cherish, rather than through the contested vocabulary of the climate debate itself.

Subject of Research: How cultural worldviews and relational values of nature shape public support for climate change and biodiversity conservation policies in Japan.

Article Title: Focus on biodiversity conservation may offer a less divisive path to climate action

Article References: Focus on biodiversity conservation may offer a less divisive path to climate action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: biodiversity conservation, climate policy, cultural worldviews, public opinion survey, relational values, environmental risk perception, Yokohama National University, policy framing, Communications Sustainability, egalitarianism, hierarchical worldviews, Japan