6 Questions with Dr. Philipe Bujold: Understanding Human Decision-Making & Scalable Environmental Solutions

With nearly a decade of experience translating behavioural science into real-world impact, Dr. Philipe Bujold is a behavioural scientist at Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment. With a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge and dual degrees in Cognitive Science from McGill University, Dr. Bujold specialises in designing evidence-based strategies that help individuals and communities make more sustainable choices. His work focuses on addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable consumption by combining behavioural insights with applied research and design.

1) We always like to start by asking how you got into your field. Can you share what inspired your journey into conservation and human behaviour?

I grew up in a small town in Canada, and my parents made sure I spent every possible moment outside playing, hiking, and exploring nature. They also let me watch Kratts’ Creatures pretty much every day (for those who don’t know it, I highly recommend checking out Zoboomafoo’s predecessor). So from a very young age, I loved animals, I loved learning about them, and I already understood that nature was facing serious challenges.

The primate obsession came later but became central to my work. Through undergrad and my PhD, I kept gravitating toward the same intersection: behavioural economics, neuroscience, and a deep curiosity about primates and evolution. My friends joke that I plan holidays around primate-watching (because I absolutely do), but honestly, our primate brain and its evolution are also central to how I think about human behaviour. But the moment where conservation came knocking was during a brief internship with UNEP’s Great Apes Survival Partnership team, and everything just clicked. I was completely hooked. I had this background in neuroscience, behavioural economics, and game theory, all filtered through studying primates, and suddenly I saw how I could actually use this outside the lab to help to address conservation challenges and protect nature.

2) Can you share a bit about your involvement with the IUCN Behaviour Change Task Force and projects you've contributed to?

I’ve crossed paths with many of the Task Force members over the years, but my formal involvement started earlier this year when Diogo and I began organising a workshop on ethical guidance for conservation behaviour change. What began as a workshop idea for ICCB (the International Congress for Conservation Biology) has evolved into a full project with the IUCN Behaviour Change Task Force, which has been incredibly exciting.

The core issue we’re tackling is that conservation behaviour change faces unique ethical challenges because of our dual mandate: ensuring both nature and people thrive. We’ve been gathering perspectives from practitioners, academics, policymakers, funders, and, crucially, from people representing communities who too often have interventions imposed on them.

This work connects to something I feel strongly about: the more time I spend in conservation, the more concerned I become that our work often goes unmonitored and unevaluated. To me, that’s an ethical failure. We need to know if our interventions cause harm and whether resources could be better spent elsewhere. We should be maximising every cent to benefit both nature and people. It’s too easy to convince ourselves we’re doing our best when there aren’t standardised ways to validate our approaches.

That’s why I value the work the task force is doing beyond this - setting standards, identifying where we can improve, and bringing people together. And all that aligns perfectly with the goals we also have at Rare’s Center for Behaviour & the Environment.

3) Could you tell us about any exciting projects or research you’re currently working on?

At Rare, I spend a lot of time helping organisations recognise that most of what they do is fundamentally about changing specific behaviour, and then building frameworks to ensure everything they do is intentional and evidence-based.

I do this type of work with large-scale programs like Rare’s Fish Forever, which focuses on sustainable fisheries management in coastal waters, and Lands for Life, our regenerative agriculture program. But I also consult and advise other NGOs in the space. Across all these projects, the goal is the same: get really clear about behavioural determinants - those psychological, social, or structural variables we can actually target.

What really excites me is that we’re starting, as a field, to move past the decades of work where deliverables were things like “run X number of social marketing campaigns” or “get 200,000 likes on a post.” Instead, we’re pushing toward meaningful metrics around behavioural determinants: Does the majority of your target audience believe this is a social norm? Do they feel confident performing the behaviour? Do they have the actual capacity to do it? Do these changes actually lead to behaviour change? These are the questions that matter.

The agricultural work is particularly rewarding. We’re showing how regenerative practices boost productivity on existing lands, reducing pressure on untouched forests (where the monkeys live!). It’s this beautiful intersection where improving farmer livelihoods directly protects biodiversity hotspots.

4) In your opinion, what is one of the biggest challenges the world faces in driving meaningful behaviour change toward conservation?

Honestly, I think we’re at an inflection point for this challenge, but I’d still consider it pretty big: our incentives and our goals are too often misaligned. Our goal is to save nature and give people the best shot at living fulfilling lives, but our funding landscape rewards the stories we tell about the work, not whether the work is directly leading us closer to reaching those goals.

This creates cascading problems. We don’t evaluate outcomes like other sciences do. We don’t systematically test approaches or build on findings. Teams stay siloed. We miss co-creation opportunities with communities. And we’re constantly chasing different funding opportunities, spreading ourselves thin across whatever seems fundable at the moment.

But I’m genuinely hopeful because I’m seeing a groundswell of change. Across the field, people are advocating for funding tied to demonstrated impact, good or bad, because failures teach us as much as successes. Program managers are building robust measurement systems. Researchers are calling for causal evaluations. Funders are starting to ask about behavioural outcomes. And the fact that we even feel comfortable talking about this now, which would have been taboo just five years ago, tells me we’re on the right track.

5) Who is someone in the conservation world (or beyond) that you look up to or that has influenced your career?

I could list the obvious heroes, Goodall, Attenborough, de Waal, or the neuroscientists who shaped my academic path. But the people who’ve had the most tangible impact are those who helped me apply that knowledge to conservation.

Gayle Burgess from TRAFFIC tops that list. She pointed me toward Rare when I finished my PhD and showed me it was possible to bridge rigorous behavioural science with practical conservation. We still connect regularly, and I wouldn’t be where I am without her guidance.

At Rare, my manager Erik Thulin has constantly pushed me to think outside the box and build better systems that make change stick, while my colleague Claudia Quintanilla has shown me how to bridge the gap between scientists and practitioners. I often think, “How would Claudia frame this to get everyone aligned?” Having great scientific mentors is one thing, but the people who teach you how to turn expertise into actual impact ensure our science doesn’t just sit on our desks but actually influences the work on the ground.

6) As you look ahead, what are your goals or hopes for the future of conservation and behaviour change?

My biggest hope is that conservation finally treats behaviour change with the scientific rigour it deserves. We’ve gotten really good at telling compelling stories about our work, but we need to get equally good at proving whether we’re actually changing behaviour. Other fields have figured this out. Public health, finance, and even climate science measure their behavioural outcomes systematically. We need to catch up. Ultimately, my hope is that “I don’t know if it worked” becomes as unacceptable as “I harmed what I tried to protect.”

Oh, and more monkeys. We can never have enough monkeys.

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