Building eco-surplus culture among urban residents as a novel strategy to improve finance for conservation in protected areas

The rapidly declining biosphere integrity, representing one of the core planetary boundaries, is alarming. In particular, the global numbers of mammals, birds, fishes, and plants declined by 68% from 1970 to 2016. One of the most widely accepted measures to halt the rate of biodiversity loss is to maintain and expand protected areas that are effectively managed. However, doing so requires substantial finance derived from nature-based tourism, specifically visitors from urban areas. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) for conducting analysis on 535 Vietnamese urban residents, the current study examined how their biodiversity loss perceptions can affect their willingness to pay for the entrance fee and conservation in protected areas. We found that perceived environmental degradation, loss of economic growth, loss of nature-based recreation opportunities, and loss of knowledge as consequences of biodiversity loss indirectly affect the willingness to pay through the mediation of the attitude towards conservation. Notably, perceived knowledge loss also has a direct positive influence on the willingness to pay for the entrance fee and conservation. In contrast, perceived loss of health is negatively associated with the attitude towards conservation. Based on these findings, we suggest that building an eco-surplus culture among urban residents by stimulating their subjective cost-benefit judgments towards biodiversity loss can be a promising way to generate more finance from nature-based tourism for conservation in protected areas and ease the domestic government’s and international organizations’ funding allocation problems. Eco-surplus culture is a set of pro-environmental attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people to reduce negative anthropogenic impacts on the environment and conserve and restore nature.