The hidden dimensions of human–wildlife conflict: Health impacts, opportunity and transaction costs

Abstract

The impact of conservation policies on human wellbeing is critical to the integration of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation. In many low-income countries, human–wildlife conflict adversely affects wellbeing of communities that closely interface with wildlife. Approaches to framing and mitigating conflict emphasize its visible costs. Hidden impacts, i.e. costs that are uncompensated, temporally delayed, or psychosocial in nature, remain poorly addressed. This paper examines the hidden impacts of human–wildlife conflict in low-income countries. It presents an account of the known and potential hidden impacts, investigating their effects on rural communities. Hidden impacts of human–wildlife conflict include diminished psychosocial wellbeing, disruption of livelihoods and food insecurity. Considerable opportunity costs are incurred through crop and livestock guarding. When seeking compensation for damage, bureaucratic inadequacies result in added transaction costs. Even though communities may be tolerant of wildlife, the hidden impacts of conflict jeopardize various components of global wellbeing. The paper concludes by identifying gaps in knowledge and outlining areas for future research that better address hidden dimensions of human–wildlife conflict.

Introduction

Conservation in the 21st century faces a fundamental challenge: to reconcile human activities with the needs of wildlife present in highly anthropogenic landscapes. Human activities over the last 200 years have indeed transformed the planet and started an era now termed the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002). The global network of protected areas, covering nearly 13% of the earth’s surface, has provided the ‘last stand’ for several large and threatened mammals (World Database on Protected Areas, 2012). Yet, in many parts of the developing world, these mammals inhabit landscapes beyond reserves where they come into conflict with local communities (Inskip and Zimmermann, 2009, Woodroffe et al., 2005c). Millions of people across the world are affected. The loss of life, crops or livestock to wildlife has significant consequences for people’s livelihoods, their food and agricultural security. The fact that the poor are dependent on natural ecosystems that conservationists seek to protect is gaining increasing recognition. Conservation and provision of livelihoods should therefore go hand-in-hand (Adams et al., 2004). Human–wildlife conflict, by compromising people’s livelihoods, seriously impedes these goals.

Human–wildlife conflict has traditionally been viewed to occur ‘when the needs and behavior of wildlife impact negatively on the goals of humans or when the goals of humans negatively impact the needs of wildlife’ (Madden, 2004, p. 248). A range of species come into conflict with people (Sillero-Zubiri et al., 2007, Woodroffe et al., 2005c), the effects of which are severe and best documented in case of large mammals (Inskip and Zimmermann, 2009, Liu et al., 2011, Marchini and Macdonald, 2012). These studies emphasize visible impacts of human–wildlife conflict, i.e. crop and livestock loss, injury and fatality. For instance, in low-income countries such as Mozambique and Namibia, over a hundred people are killed annually by crocodiles (Lamarque et al., 2009), whilst in India elephants kill more than one person every day (Rangarajan et al., 2010). In both Asia and Africa, communities may lose up to 10–15% of their total agricultural output to elephants (Lamarque et al., 2009, Madhusudan and Sankaran, 2010). Such losses may seem insignificant at a national level, but they give rise to exponentially high costs for the affected individuals and families, many of whom are amongst the least privileged people in the world.

Besides visible impacts, human–wildlife conflict has a range of poorly-documented indirect or ‘hidden’ impacts on the poor in low-income nations. These impacts include opportunity and transaction costs that occur as a result of conflict (Ogra, 2008), as well as health impacts that impair people’s physical and mental wellbeing (Chowdhury et al., 2008, Dixon et al., 2009). The effects of such impacts penetrate far deeper than immediate threats from wildlife. However, most attempts to examine human–wildlife conflict and policies to mitigate it gravitate toward visible aspects of the issue (Sangay and Vernes, 2008, Treves, 2009, Treves et al., 2006, Vidya and Thuppil, 2010, Woodroffe et al., 2005c). Hidden impacts are given scant attention.

In this paper, we discuss the visible and hidden impacts that human–wildlife conflict has on local communities in low-income countries. First, we present an overview of current approaches to framing and mitigating human–wildlife conflict. Second, we expand upon these perspectives to present a fuller account of its known and potential hidden impacts on human wellbeing by synthesizing the available literature (see Supporting Information for literature review protocol). Our discussion is largely restricted to large mammals such as lions, tigers, leopards, African and Asian elephants as they are the focus of several conservation interventions (Gubbi, 2012, Palmeira et al., 2008, Treves, 2009), and for which hidden impacts are relatively better documented. Third, we identify how gaps in knowledge can be addressed towards mitigation and future policy formulation. In conclusion, we outline directions for further research that address hidden dimensions of human–wildlife conflict better.