From an environmental standpoint, 2025 was a bruising year. Wildfires devastated the Balkans, California, the Arctic, and Brazil’s Pantanal. Cyclones and hurricanes ravaged South and Southeast Asia. Floods and heatwaves exacerbated by climate change swept across nearly every continent. Meanwhile, powerful governments opted to continue fossil fuel development and dependence, USAID’s shutdown disrupted essential climate, conservation, and health work, and the rapid growth of AI put new pressure on scarce water and land resources.
People are tired. Many are demoralized. Communities are stretched. But amid the hardship, there were real wins. Indigenous and local leaders secured significant cultural, financial, and environmental victories. Renewable energy continued to accelerate. Community-led projects have built food forests, cleaned local waterways, and reduced human-wildlife conflict. We have persisted, buoyed by collective action and small wins.
As we head deeper into the 2020s, let us hold on to these wins as motivation. Here are five of the most-read lessons from Rare’s Behavior Beat newsletter in 2025 that we can use to spur more action.
1. The West needs a fundamental shift in its relationship with nature
Western conservation has long operated under a false separation between people and nature. This mindset has displaced or harmed Indigenous and local communities in pursuit of “pristine” landscapes. It’s also contributed to today’s biodiversity crisis and to an “extinction of experience,” where each generation becomes more disconnected from the natural world and less able to recognize its degradation.
Conservation psychologist Stephanie Klarmann offers a compelling corrective: effective conservation requires acknowledging people as part of nature, not intruders within.
By grounding conservation in social and behavioral science, justice, and human behavior, Klarmann calls for approaches that rebuild human-nature relationships, elevate diverse voices, and recognize the intertwined well-being of humans and nonhuman species. With this ethos of coexistence, conservation can become more just, participatory, and effective.
2. Focus on these 25 behavior-centered solution pathways
Unsustainable human consumption and production now require the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to sustain our current demands. These pressures can’t be solved by policy and industry reform alone. People, their households, and communities shape energy use, food systems, land stewardship, and waste.
Rare’s report on People-centered solutions for conservation and climate identifies 25 high-impact pathways where nonprofits, governmental agencies, and funders worldwide should focus their efforts. When communities are engaged and behavior shifts at scale, ecosystems measurably improve. These pathways offer a roadmap for aligning human motivation with environmental outcomes.
3. Use these 17 pro-environmental behavioral determinants to design better programs
Effective conservation depends on understanding what drives human decisions: values, norms, identity, experiences, perceived control, and more. These determinants reflect how individuals perceive themselves, their communities, and the natural world, guiding whether they adopt, resist, or sustain behavior change. But measuring these determinants reliably is challenging.
A 2025 review by Doughty & Thomas-Walters shows how practitioners can design better surveys that reduce bias, honor cultural context, and capture the factors that truly influence pro-environmental behavior. High-quality measurement of determinants enables ethical and contextual interventions grounded in lived experience rather than assumptions.
Bonus: Here are 17 behavioral interventions to foster long-lasting change.
4. Adaptive monitoring and implementation methods can foster change
Rare piloted a real-time “pulse monitoring” system within coastal fisheries that used interactive voice response surveys and a live dashboard to test whether evolving community beliefs, norms, and expectations could be tracked during implementation and not just at the end. While the technology worked, participation was extremely low — revealing three core barriers: limited trust in unfamiliar automated calls, technical glitches, and unclear value for fishers.
The lesson? Strong design alone is not enough. Effective behavioral monitoring must be clearly visible and beneficial to participants, co-designed with communities, and introduced by credible messengers. Adaptive, people-centered monitoring can help practitioners respond faster and more effectively during implementation.
5. Global organizations must continue to speak up for behavioral science
Behavioral science is one of the most powerful but underutilized tools for driving environmental and climate solutions. From Colombian farmers adopting regenerative practices to coastal communities preparing for rising sea levels, people change when social norms shift, trusted messengers encourage action, and when new behaviors feel possible and worthwhile.
Behavioral insights reveal why good intentions often fail to translate into action. As climate impacts intensify, institutions like the World Resources Institute must continue to champion behavioral insights and encourage others to integrate them into policy, finance, and program design. Structural reforms matter, but billions of individual decisions ultimately shape resilience, adaptation, and sustainability.
What did we miss?
These were some of the most-read articles from Rare’s Behavior Beat in 2025. What other insights, stories, or research would you add? Let us know at behavior@rare.org.
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Edited by Larissa Hotra and Kristi Marciano.