Biodiversity hotspots are regions of the world that have exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and face significant threats from human activity, such as habitat loss (Monastersky, 2014; Murali et al., 2021; Trew and Maclean, 2021). With the increasing intersection of human populations and wildlife in these hotspots, the issue of human-wildlife conflict arises, which threatens wildlife survival as well as human livelihoods (Joppa et al., 2010; Karanth and Kudalkar, 2017; Karanth and Vanamamalai, 2020).

Environmental education (EE) initiatives in biodiversity hotspots can help reduce or de-escalate conflicts by increasing adults’ and children’s awareness of environmental issues, enhancing positive attitudes toward wildlife, and providing information on safe ways to coexist with wildlife (Espinosa and Jacobson, 2012; Salazar et al., 2024, 2022). However, many biodiversity hotspots span vast geographical areas, often crossing political boundaries and encompassing diverse cultural groups (Gorenflo et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2020). This geographic, ecological and sociocultural diversity creates a fundamental challenge to EE: how can programs designed for specific local contexts be scaled effectively across such heterogeneous landscapes? A program that is impactful in one community may fail to resonate in another if it does not reflect local customs, values, or governance structures. To create effective EE programs in these areas, it is important to consider how local cultures, customs, and practices shape environmental attitudes and behaviors. In addition to ecological variation, education programs and curricula may need to be adapted to reflect the unique social and political context of different areas within a biodiversity hotspot (Joppa et al., 2010; Manfredo, 2008). Scalability or the ability to deliver consistent conservation messages while remaining responsive to local diversity, remains a critical, unresolved question. Understanding how to overcome this barrier is central to advancing EE in biodiversity hotspots.

India is home to four globally recognized biodiversity hotspots, the Himalayas, the Indo-Burma region, the Western Ghats and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Western Ghats, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is known for its rich biodiversity. The region, covering 140,000 km² in a 1600 km long stretch is also considered as one of the eight ‘hottest hotspots’ of global biodiversity and harbors about 121 species of mammals including populations of globally threatened ‘landscape’ species such as the Asian elephant, gaur and tiger (Penjor et al., 2024; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d). Endemic and endangered species such as the lion-tailed macaque, Nilgiri tahr and Nilgiri langur are unique to this region (Myers et al., 2000; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d). However, this region also harbors the highest human population density across all eight hottest hotspots (Cincotta et al., 2000) resulting in high levels of human-wildlife conflicts reported across the Western Ghats, especially along the borders of wildlife reserves (Karanth et al., 2012; Karanth and Vanamamalai, 2020; Ramesh et al., 2022).

The Western Ghats runs across six states of India: Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Each of these states is unique and differs in terms of size, population, language, culture, religious beliefs, and traditions. Relationships with animals also vary across this region. For example, Goa’s wildlife is concentrated in smaller sanctuaries such as Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary and Mollem National Park. Goa’s major focus is on its marine ecosystem and hence terrestrial wildlife conservation receives less attention compared to the other states (Biodiversity in Goa, n.d; IUCN, 2016; Usmani and Ansari, 2020; WWF-India, 2016). In Goa, rapid urbanization and tourism-related pressures have led to habitat fragmentation, which also impacts wildlife conservation efforts. In the case of Karnataka, about 45% of its land areas lie within the Western Ghats making it one of the most biodiverse states in India. Karnataka also has a rich cultural history tied to its forests, with indigenous communities such as the Halakki Vakkaligas and Gowlis having unique practices enabling wildlife conservation (Balasubramanian and Sangha, 2023; Nayak, 2017; Roy et al., 2015). Tamil Nadu encompasses parts of the Nilgiri Hills within the Western Ghats. The state has a long-standing tradition of worshipping animals like elephants as sacred beings (Kalpana, 2024). Indigenous communities such as the Todas in the Nilgiri Hills also have unique cultural practices tied to wildlife preservation (Magimairaj and Balamurugan, 2017; Nair et al., 2022).

Our aim with the Wild Shaale program was to create an EE program that could be implemented in government schools across the Western Ghats. However, given the diverse cultural, linguistic, and ecological landscapes within the region, we also wanted to assess whether the program would be uniformly effective across these varying contexts. To achieve this, we developed a comprehensive EE program specifically tailored for students aged 10-13 (Salazar et al., 2024, 2022). The program incorporated regionally relevant ecological concepts and conservation themes, ensuring the content was both engaging and relevant to the Western Ghats. From 2022-2023, we implemented and evaluated the program across three states: Tamil Nadu, Goa, and Karnataka. Wild Shaale offers a particularly valuable model for exploring scalability because it was explicitly designed to be delivered across highly diverse socio-cultural and ecological contexts within a single biodiversity hotspot. The program combines a standardized curriculum focused on human–wildlife coexistence with flexible, locally relevant examples, language adaptations, and community-specific content. This hybrid structure makes Wild Shaale uniquely suited to test how environmental education programs can retain their effectiveness while scaling across regions that differ in culture, governance, and human-wildlife dynamics.

Our primary objective was to assess whether the program had a consistent impact across states or if regional differences influenced program outcomes. This evaluation enabled us to refine the program, ensuring its adaptability and effectiveness in fostering environmental awareness among young learners across the Western Ghats.

We report on data from 7381 students across the three states, with 1511 from Goa (20.4%), 3766 from Karnataka (51%) and 2104 from Tamil Nadu (28.4%). The students were between the ages of 10–13 and ranged from 5th to 7th grade. We covered 25 schools in Goa, 124 schools in Karnataka and 51 in Tamil Nadu. There was equal participation of boys and girls in all three states (Girls = 49.9% in Goa, 51.1% in Karnataka and 48.9% in Tamil Nadu).

Participation in the Wild Shaale program led to measurable improvements across all domains (e.g., environmental attitudes, knowledge, and safety behaviors) in all three states. At the same time, variation in baseline knowledge and attitudes and in the magnitude of gains highlights that while the program’s core content is broadly effective, its impact is also shaped by local contexts. These findings show that the Wild Shaale program is scalable across diverse settings and emphasize the need for context-specific refinements to maximize its effectiveness.

We found that participating in the Wild Shaale program resulted in a significant increase in students’ environmental literacy and knowledge of safe behaviors across Goa, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Changes in attitudes, while less pronounced, also showed similar trends across the three states. This indicates that it is possible to scale an environmental education program across a culturally and geographically biodiverse hotspot with small adaptations to local contexts. However, while the overall trends were similar, there were notable differences between states, such as finding that students in Tamil Nadu had the lowest pre-test scores on environmental knowledge questions, compared to the other states. We also found significant differences in students’ baseline attitudes toward wildlife across the different states. Students in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu reported more positive baseline attitudes towards wildlife than students in Goa, although baseline attitudes were generally positive across all three states. We did not find a major shift in attitudes toward wildlife after students participated in the Wild Shaale program. This might be due to their highly positive baseline attitudes, which left little room for growth, or to the fact that environmental attitudes may be relatively stable and therefore more difficult to influence through short interventions (Gifford and Sussman, 2012; Kaiser et al., 2014).

One of the most positive outcomes of the Wild Shaale program was the consistent and statistically significant improvement in students’ environmental knowledge and knowledge of safe behaviors around wildlife from pre- to post-. It is notable that for environmental knowledge questions, students from Tamil Nadu provided fewer correct answers in the pre-test compared to those from the other two states. This is particularly interesting given the higher positive attitude towards wildlife that Tamil Nadu students demonstrated. A positive attitude toward wildlife does not always correlate with accurate knowledge about wildlife. Studies have shown that attitudes often emerge through informal interactions with animals or cultural practices, whereas accurate knowledge requires structured learning (Castillo-Huitrón et al., 2024; Liordos et al., 2017; Young et al., 2018). In Tamil Nadu, students may exhibit strong emotional connections to wildlife but lack detailed factual understanding. Several factors may explain this result, one of which could be educational gaps in localized wildlife knowledge.

While environmental education is compulsory in India in the formal education system, a review found that there is variability between states as to how EE is infused in textbooks and that there is still little active learning in natural environments (Sharma and Menonn, n.d). When our Wild Shaale educators reviewed textbooks across the states they work in, they also found that environmental topics tended to be broad - focusing on issues such as climate change and pollution - rather than local wildlife knowledge. Similar studies have revealed that limited emphasis on wildlife education in school curricula can result in lower baseline knowledge among students. Research in Malaysia showed that younger students had significantly less wildlife knowledge due to gaps in their syllabus, which only introduced biodiversity topics at later stages of education (Arumugam et al., 2019). A study of rural children’s knowledge and attitudes toward wildlife in the nearby state of Kerala found that children had limited recognition of local mammal species, apart from species that are regularly publicized by the media (Binoy et al., 2021). Their knowledge of conservation issues facing these species was also low.

The small shift in attitudes from pre- to post- may be partly due to a ‘ceiling effect’ where baseline scores leave little room for growth (Ernst and Theimer, 2011). We found a similar ceiling effect in our previous evaluation of the Wild Shaale program (Salazar et al., 2024). In Goa, where baseline attitudes were slightly less positive than in other states, there were small but significant positive shifts in attitudes in response to questions such as “How much do you value tigers?”, “Do you hope there will be more tigers in the future?” and “Would you be interested in learning more about wild animals?”. However, the effect sizes of these differences were very small. It would be interesting to test whether a longer program with more immersive time in nature or hands-on experiences with wildlife would result in a larger positive shift in attitudes. Dosage, which includes the duration and intensity of a program, can influence program outcomes (Wheaton et al., 2018). While the relationship between dosage and environmental attitudes is complicated, some studies suggest that longer programs and direct experiences in the outdoors are correlated with more positive increases in environmental attitudes (Dettmann-Easler and Pease, 1999; Rickinson, 2001). A study conducted at the Ohio Wildlife Centre showed that children’s attitudes and willingness to co-exist with local species improved significantly after participating in animal encounter programs and that these effects persisted over time (Jerger et al., 2022).

Some of the differences we found across states from pre- to post- could be due in part to the differences between educators. Each state had a different team of educators implementing the program. While all educators participated in the same training and were supposed to implement a standardized curriculum, differences in program delivery, facilitator emphasis and teaching style may have influenced our results. Future studies could explore whether there is an educator effect on program outcomes. Notably, for one knowledge-based question, students in Tamil Nadu had fewer correct responses in the post-session compared to the pre-session. This unexpected result could reflect differences in how the concept was conveyed and understood, variation in facilitator emphasis, or even differences in student attention during those sessions.

In addition, our evaluation captures only immediate, short-term changes measured shortly after the program’s completion. This limits our ability to assess whether changes in knowledge and attitudes persist over time or translate into behavioral outcomes. Future research should incorporate long-term follow-up assessments and, where possible, behavioral measures to better understand the lasting impacts and real-world relevance of environmental education programs like Wild Shaale.

In the future, it would also be interesting to explore whether children who participate in the Wild Shaale program pass on knowledge to their parents or to other members of their families and communities. For instance, children who participated in similar initiatives were found to influence their families and communities by promoting coexistence practices (Jerger et al., 2022; Liu and Green, 2024). A study conducted in the Republic of Seychelles showed that the environmental knowledge of parents was positively influenced by their children’s participation in wetland-based education through local wildlife clubs (Damerell et al., 2013). Similarly, a study in Australia showed that EE programs led to children discussing environmental issues at home and thereby influenced the knowledge and behavior of their parents (Ballantyne et al., 2001). In a Costa Rican village, students and their parents showed significant gains in knowledge after the students participated in a one-month environmental education program about scarlet macaw conservation; interestingly, they also transmitted course information to their neighbors (Vaughan et al., 2003). Future research on the Wild Shaale program could explore whether there are long-term changes in attitudes among participants and whether the program results in intergenerational knowledge transfer.

Although there were significant differences in baseline attitudes toward wildlife between states, it is promising that baseline attitudes were highly positive overall. This could be due to cultural and religious values related to wildlife. For example, many communities in these states revere animals like elephants and tigers as symbols of divinity or cultural heritage, which may positively influence children’s baseline attitudes towards wildlife (Bist et al., 2002; Nair et al., 2020; Sharma and Kumar, 2021). Many communities in the Western Ghats also have a long history of living alongside wildlife. Adults in a community near two protected areas in Tamil Nadu had largely positive attitudes toward wildlife conservation, despite experiencing high levels of human-wildlife conflict (Karanth and Ranganathan, 2018). In areas like this, where attitudes toward wildlife are already very positive, it may be more important for programs like Wild Shaale to focus on environmental literacy and knowledge of safe behaviors around wildlife.

The differences we observed in baseline attitudes toward wildlife across states could be due to a multitude of factors, including frequency of interactions with wildlife, level of exposure to conservation efforts and hyper local variability in cultural attitudes towards wildlife. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have higher densities of wildlife and more intact wildlife habitat left than Goa, which could explain why students in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have more positive baseline attitudes (CEPF, 2016; Goa Forest Department, 2023; MadhuSudan et al., 2015). The three southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala are home to a large share of India’s threatened endemic species, accounting for 51% of the country’s species threat abatement score (Chaudhary et al., 2022). This biodiversity richness, combined with recent conservation initiatives, may increase awareness and positive attitudes toward wildlife conservation in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu compared to Goa. For example, Tamil Nadu has focused on sensitization programs in villages near sanctuaries and national parks to mitigate human-wildlife conflict, which may have contributed to more positive attitudes among children (Kanagavel et al., 2013). In Karnataka, the presence of large, interconnected forest landscapes enhances opportunities for communities to interact with wildlife (Jayadevan et al., 2020; Karanth and Vanamamalai, 2020; Nayak et al., 2020). Karnataka has undertaken significant efforts to protect wildlife through initiatives like expanding protected areas and connecting fragmented forests to create unbroken habitats. In 2019, Karnataka expanded the Sharavathi Valley protected area to create a sanctuary dedicated to the endangered lion-tailed macaque. The state has also worked on securing elephant corridors like Kollegal (Edayarhalli-Doddasampige) corridor to provide safe passage for over a thousand elephants, minimizing human-wildlife conflict. These measures not only aid conservation but also raise awareness among local populations about the importance of wildlife preservation (Daniels et al., 1993; Sarmah, 2019).

Unlike Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, which are home to extensive forested areas (16.13% for Karnataka and 16.4% in Tamil Nadu (Forest Survey of India, 2021)) and significant wildlife reserves, Goa has relatively smaller and fragmented wildlife habitats. Studies have shown that proximity to natural habitats and time spent in nature fosters a stronger connection and more positive attitudes towards the environment (Soga and Gaston, 2016). Goa’s rapid urbanization and tourism-driven economy (Sutheeshna, 2021; World Bank, 1998) may result in children spending more time in urban settings with less exposure to nature (Chawla, 2020). Children in urban areas tend to have lower awareness and appreciation for wildlife due to reduced interaction with natural environments compared to rural counterparts (Mariki, 2016; Strife and Downey, 2009). Added to this, conservation efforts in Goa often prioritize marine biodiversity, mangroves, and coastal ecosystems due to their ecological significance and economic value for tourism and fisheries (Usmani and Ansari, 2020; WWF-India, 2016). This focus might overshadow terrestrial wildlife conservation efforts, leading to lower engagement with land-based species among children.

The differences we observed in baseline attitudes toward wildlife may also be attributed to the complex interplay of cultural, social, and political differences across states. Studies in other countries have demonstrated differences in attitudes toward wildlife across cultural groups in the same region. In Qatar, a study compared attitudes towards five threatened animal species among diverse cultural groups, including Western, South East Asian, Middle Eastern and Sub-Saharan African populations, living in the same geographic area. The study found significant cultural differences in liking and endorsement of government protection for these species. For example, Western and South East Asian participants showed more positive attitudes than participants from the Arabian Gulf region, despite living in the same environment (Bruder et al., 2022). Another study conducted in China with two ethnic groups, The Yi and the Mosuo, showed that, in spite of residing in the same geographic area, the Mosuo people demonstrated more positive attitudes towards wildlife conservation than the Yi, highlighting the role that cultural factors play in shaping conservation perspectives (Yang et al., 2010).

Our findings also highlight several policy implications for the design and implementation of large-scale environmental education programs in biodiversity hotspots. First, when scaling across states or regions, it is important to adapt program delivery to local cultural and ecological contexts while maintaining core curricular consistency. Policies that enable flexible, region-specific content adaptation, while ensuring a shared framework of learning objectives, are likely to be more effective than strictly standardized approaches. Second, investment in educator training and ongoing support is critical. Since we found potential variation in outcomes across states that may relate to differences among educators, state-level education departments and conservation agencies should consider establishing training and mentoring systems for environmental educators, ensuring program fidelity and quality at scale. Finally, long-term monitoring and evaluation should be incorporated into policy frameworks. Mandating follow-up assessments would allow programs like Wild Shaale to track not only short-term knowledge gains but also longer-term shifts in attitudes and behaviors. Embedding such evaluation mechanisms within existing education policy could help governments and NGOs better allocate resources and improve program designs.

Our study demonstrates that Wild Shaale is a scalable education program that is effective across diverse cultural, political and ecological contexts in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot. With over 32 million children (0–13 years of age; projections from Ministry of Education, 2023) living in the six states that include the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, the scalability of EE programs is critical to make these programs accessible to more students. Programs like Wild Shaale can play an important role in conservation by increasing local environmental literacy and maintaining or improving positive attitudes toward wildlife. Importantly, they can also help supplement more generalized environmental knowledge with information specific to particular ecosystems or hotspots.

This study evaluated the effectiveness and scalability of the Wild Shaale environmental education program across three Indian states in the Western Ghats. We found consistent gains in knowledge among participating students, with one exception for one question in one state. While these differences may reflect contextual and educator-related factors, the overall pattern demonstrates that structured, school-based EE can be implemented effectively at scale.

At the same time, our findings underscore several limitations. The evaluation design was short-term, without follow-up to test persistence of change. Educator variability likely contributed to state-wise differences, and the program was assessed primarily through immediate pre- and post-session comparisons. Future research should incorporate long-term tracking and experimental designs that better isolate educator and contextual effects. Despite these caveats, this study highlights important lessons for policy and practice. Scaling EE programs across diverse regions requires balancing standardized content with cultural and ecological adaptation, strengthening educator training and support, and embedding monitoring and evaluation into education policy. Programs like Wild Shaale provide a promising model for large-scale environmental education, with the potential to improve coexistence between people and wildlife in biodiversity hotspots worldwide.