Human-Wildlife Conflict: A threat to Biodiversity

Human-wildlife conflict is defined as struggles that emerge when the presence or behaviour of wildlife poses an actual or perceived, direct and recurring threat to human interests or needs, leading to disagreements between groups of people and negative impacts on people and/or wildlife. Human-wildlife conflict is also defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as “any interaction between humans and wildlife that results in negative impacts of human social, economic or cultural life, on the conservation of wildlife populations, or on the environment.
The factors leading to Human-Wildlife Conflict are the result of humans coming in proximity to natural habitats of wildlife. For instance, crops are raised by herbivores and livestock by carnivores, leading the farmers that depend on both to take extreme measures in preventing the loss of wildlife. With a rapidly increasing human population and high biodiversity, interactions between people and wild animals are becoming more and more prevalent. Habitat disturbance is the destruction of the home of wild animals. Humans kill or chase wild animals by digging, cutting, sealing by stones and smoking in their natural habitat. Other factors include large scale habitat destruction through deforestation overgrazing by livestock and expansion of human settlements and agriculture.
A new report by WWF and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that human-wildlife conflict is the main threat to the long-term survival of some of the world’s most emblematic species. The report, A future for all – the need for human-wildlife coexistence, highlights that globally, conflict-related killing affects more than 75% of the world’s wild cat species, as well as many other terrestrial and marine carnivore species such as polar bears and Mediterranean monk seals, and large herbivores such as elephants. Wildlife faces numerous threats, among them, effects of climate change, loss of habitat from deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, infrastructure and now conflict with humans; factors that have led to a significant decline of wildlife species and to the possible extinction of species whose numbers were really low already. The report states that while it’s not possible to completely eradicate human-wildlife conflict, there are approaches that involve the full participation of local communities that can help reduce it and lead to coexistence between humans and wildlife. One success story is the Kavango Zambezi Trans frontier Conservation Area in Southern Africa where communities reported that most of their livestock losses through predation by lions occurred where free-ranging, unprotected cattle roamed in the evenings and at night. The installation of fixed and mobile lion-proof corrals for night-time protection in risk-prone areas led to a 95% reduction in livestock killings in 2016, and there were zero retaliatory killings of lions in 2016 (compared to 17 killed in 2012 and 2013), allowing previously threatened lion populations to recover.
There are many steps that can be taken to mitigate human-wildlife conflict, but the most successful ones are those that involve local community members in the planning, implementation, and maintenance.
Translocation of problematic animals: Relocating supposed “problem” animals from a site of conflict to a new place is a mitigation technique used in the past, although recent research has shown that this approach can have detrimental impacts on species and is largely ineffective.
Erection of fences or other barriers: Building barriers around cattle biomass (livestock enclosure), creating distinct wildlife corridors, and erecting beehive fences around farms to deter elephants have all demonstrated the ability to be successful and cost-effective strategies for mitigating human-wildlife conflict.
Compensation: in some cases, governmental systems have been established to offer monetary compensation for losses sustained due to human-wildlife conflict. These systems hope to deter the need for retaliatory killings of animals and to financially incentivize the coexisting of humans and wildlife.
Predator-deterring guard dogs: The use of guard dogs to protect livestock from depredation has been effective in mitigating human-carnivore conflict around the globe. A recent review found that 15.4% of study cases researching human-carnivore conflict used livestock-guarding dogs as a management technique; with animal losses on average 60 times lower than the norm.
There are immense challenges in addressing HWC around the world, in particular because underlying cultural, political and economic aspects that shape these conflicts are often very complex and poorly understood. Indeed, HWCs are in essence conflicts between stakeholders, and perhaps more accurately presented as ‘human-human conflicts’. Sometimes several groups are also involved, weighing in with a range of different interests and needs. In some cases, successes in species recovery have resulted in creating new HWC, for example where carnivores have recovered in numbers and expanded their range. Therefore, conservation strategies for conflict-prone species need to consider not only current scenarios but also anticipate emerging conflicts in order to ensure sustainable coexistence. A further challenge is that effective methods of damage control (and indeed retaliation control) are often elusive. Even where they do exist, they are often not implemented in a socially and financially sustainable way.
Human-wildlife coexistence is as complex and context-specific as conflict. At the most basic level, the goal of coexistence requires that at some level and in some form, humans must choose to share landscapes and natural resources with wildlife in sustainable ways. If human-wildlife conflict is about conflicts between stakeholders over wildlife, then achieving coexistence ideally requires agreement or at least cooperation between stakeholders over how to manage a situation. The concept of coexistence is emerging into mainstream conservation science with a rich diversity of developing ideas and may best be mobilised as a flexible concept to ensure that diverse research disciplines collaborate on the maturation of this concept.
To this end the IUCN Species Survival Commission Human–Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group has published an IUCN Position Statement on the Management of Human–Wildlife Conflict, urging governments, NGOs, researchers, practitioners, community leaders, environmental agencies and others to ensure that efforts to manage human–wildlife conflicts are pursued through well-informed, holistic and collaborative processes that take into account underlying social, cultural and economic contexts.
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