Knowing Nature Across Environmental Issue Domains: Knowledge Types, Cultural Worldviews, and Public Responses to Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Climate change and biodiversity loss are deeply interconnected, yet the psychological foundations of public responses to these two crises are rarely examined within a unified framework. Although these challenges are often addressed separately, it remains unclear whether similar psychological mechanisms underlie risk perception and policy support across environmental issue domains and policy types. Using a nationwide survey in Japan (N=1,136), this study investigates how cultural worldviews and three types of environmental knowledge (biophysical, cause-related, and consequence-related) relate to risk perception and policy support across both issue domains of climate change and biodiversity loss, distinguishing between mitigation and adaptation measures. Hierarchical worldviews were consistently related to lower risk perception and policy support, whereas individualistic worldviews, which were often unrelated or negatively associated with climate engagement in previous studies, were positively associated with biodiversity risk perception and policy support, indicating that biodiversity issues may offer a distinct pathway for engaging individualists. This contrast suggests that the effects of individualistic worldviews vary depending on whether policies are perceived as intrusive, abstract, or locally grounded. This pattern may be particularly relevant when conservation actions are framed in terms of local ecosystems and adaptive management. Knowledge effects were context-dependent. Cause-related knowledge was positively associated with support for climate change mitigation and all biodiversity policy types. Consequence-related knowledge was particularly relevant for climate change adaptation policies, whereas biophysical knowledge was positively associated with support for biodiversity-related climate change adaptation measures. In contrast, interactions between cultural worldviews and knowledge emerged primarily in the climate change domain and were more limited in the biodiversity loss domain, suggesting that the relationship between knowledge and policy support is less sensitive to variations in cultural worldviews for biodiversity loss. These findings suggest that public responses to environmental crises arise from context-dependent combinations of cultural worldviews, differentiated knowledge types, and policy characteristics. Therefore, environmental communication strategies and policy design may be effective when they align consequence-related and biophysical information with specific policy contexts, rather than assuming uniform psychological drivers across environmental issues.