Human and wildlife conflict is a serious global threat

Human and wildlife conflict (HWC) refers to the negative interactions between human and wild animals, with undesirable consequences for both people and their resources and wildlife and their habitats caused by competition for shared natural resources between human and wildlife, influences human food security and the well-being of both human and animals. In many regions these conflicts have intensified over recent decades as a result of human population growth and the transformation of land use.

HWC is a serious global threat to sustainable development, food security and conservation in urban and rural landscapes alike. In general, the consequences of HWC include: crop destruction, reduced agricultural productivity, competition for grazing lands and water supply, livestock predation, injury and death to human, damage to infrastructure, and increased risk of disease transmission among wildlife and livestock.  

With specific reference to forests, a high density of large ungulates such as deer, can cause severe damage to the vegetation and can threaten regeneration by trampling or browsing small trees, rubbing themselves on trees or stripping tree bark. This behavior can have important economic implications and can lead to polarization between forest and wildlife managers.   

Previously, conflict mitigation strategies utilized lethal control, translocation, population size regulation and endangered species preservation. Recent management now uses an interdisciplinary set of approaches to solving conflicts. These include applying scientific research, sociological studies and the arts to reducing conflicts. As human-wildlife conflict inflicts direct and indirect consequences on people and animals, its mitigation is an important priority for the management of biodiversity and protected areas. Resolving human-wildlife conflicts and fostering coexistence requires well-informed, holistic and collaborative processes that take into account underlying social, cultural and economic contexts.  

Many countries are starting to explicitly include human-wildlife conflict in national policies and strategies for wildlife management, development and poverty alleviation. At the national level, cross-sectoral collaboration between forestry, wildlife, agriculture, livestock and other relevant sectors is a key.  

Human–wildlife conflict is 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. 

Elephants and lions are iconic species that help raise substantial funds for conservation. However, they also pose significant threats to people, crops, and livestock, and are themselves threatened with extinction.

 In a new article published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists have identified the areas that are most at risk for conflicts between humans and elephants and lions in Africa. They also estimated the associated return on investment of building and maintaining high-quality fences, which are used to reduce conflict between humans and wildlife.

Associate Professor Enrico Di Minin, who is the lead author of this article and leads the Helsinki Lab of Interdisciplinary Conservation Science at the University of Helsinki, highlights that human pressure on elephants and lions are extremely high.

African forest and savanna elephants have recently been classified as Critically Endangered and Endangered in the IUCN Red List of species, while African lions are classified as Vulnerable. Human activities pose the greatest threats to these species, particularly retaliatory killings of lions in response to livestock losses and of elephants in response to crop damage. Elephants and lions also kill dozens to hundreds of people each year.

Although a variety of conflict mitigation strategies could be deployed to address human-wildlife conflict, the team has assessed the return on investment of deploying high-quality mitigation fences, which have been found to be effective in reducing human-wildlife but are very expensive to build and maintain.

More and more African countries are starting to rely on mitigation fencing to better protect their citizens from the most dangerous wildlife species.

However, areas of intensive human pressure already produce hard boundaries around remaining areas of natural habitat and bold strategies to conserve these species are immediately needed, especially as human pressure will increase in the future with Africa experiencing very high human population growth by the end of the century.