Abstract ID: 3.11976 | Accepted as Talk | Requested as: Talk | TBA | TBA

Nepal, nested within the Hindu Kush Himalayas, faces mounting challenges from land-use change, overexploitation of natural resources, and climate change. These pressures are driving a decline in biodiversity and its related contributions to people. International frameworks such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework are established to address these issues. But they also risk generalized, top-down approaches to conservation that overlook local priorities, leading to misunderstandings, conflicts, and resistance to ecological transitions. To understand the importance of community perspectives in developing context-driven conservation strategies that effectively bridge global goals and local realities, we examined how local communities perceive nature’s contributions to their wellbeing along an elevational gradient in eastern Nepal. We conducted 320 semi-structured household surveys to explore the material, non-material, and regulating contributions of nature (NCP) to human wellbeing and examine how geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural factors shape people’s perceptions of NCP. Our results revealed that while respondents broadly acknowledged nature as integral to their wellbeing, the strength and character of this connection were highly context-specific. Higher-elevation mountain communities, whose lives and livelihoods were more intricately linked with nature, reported more positive perceptions, reflecting their greater reliance on NCP. Conversely, inhabitants residing in the lower elevation plains where human-elephant conflicts are frequent, exhibited comparatively more negative attitudes. Furthermore, formal levels of education, socioeconomic status, and gender also shaped perceptions of nature’s contributions to wellbeing, influencing how people value and interact with the environment. These insights point to the need for holistic conservation strategies that move beyond dominant forms of conservation focused solely on habitat preservation to a more comprehensive approach that supports various NCP simultaneously. Taken together with previous evidence from the same region for the importance of a people-focused and contextualized approach to sustainable development and for tight links between NCPs and sustainability, our work emphasizes the need for context-sensitive, integrated approaches to socio-ecological transitions that not only safeguard biodiversity but also enhance human wellbeing.