How Media Trust Mediates the Adoption of Fish Screens by Irrigators in Australia: The Intermediate Effect of Resource Efficacy

Fish screens are a sustainable agricultural innovation that offers economic and environmental benefits by protecting aquatic life and enhancing the efficiency of irrigation. In freshwater irrigation ecosystems, fish screens help protect aquatic organisms by reducing fish entrainment, facilitating ecological connectivity, and lowering mortality at early life stages. Therefore, they contribute significantly to aquatic biodiversity conservation. However, the role of trust in media in influencing Australian irrigators’ intentions to use fish screens remains underexplored. The study, guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and incorporating the Theory of Consumption Values, examines trust in media as a persuasive factor impacting the functional, environmental, and Interpersonal Trust Cue of fish screens. The irrigators’ willingness to test, adopt, or implement fish screens can also predict the irrigators’ readiness to act for biodiversity-relevant outcomes. Data were collected between December 2021 and May 2023 from 192 Australian irrigators (sampling frame = 3736; response rate = 5.1%). The PLS-SEM results reveal that trust in media significantly predicts adoption intention (β = 0.134, 95% CI [0.021, 0.246]) and resource (time) efficacy (β = 0.170, 95% CI [0.054, 0.289]), with resource efficacy partially mediating this relationship. The study offers a theoretical contribution by integrating the ELM, the Theory of Consumption Value, and resource efficacy to explain how trust in media influences adoption through different persuasive routes. The model explains 22.5% of the variance in adoption intention. The findings indicate that resource efficacy is a critical enabling factor in translating conservation-oriented communication into an effective measure to protect freshwater biodiversity.