PES is often touted as win-win with both environmental gains and poverty alleviation. But REDD+ does not neccesarily translate into forest conservation or benefit local communities.
Pushing ever closer to protected areas and wild lands are farms and settlements, the porous margins becoming the frontlines of human-ungulate conflict. Arati Rao explores the dynamics at these edges, the main players and how their perceptions affect reality.
The drivers of discord between humans and wild species often lie deeper than the shallow measuring implements of science can reach. We explore the lived experience of conflict between fishing communities and turtles in two very different socio-ecological contexts in the Lakshadweep Islands and the Orissa coast.
Human-wildlife conflict is widespread in today’s South Asia and the wider world. Forty-seven elephants, seven leopards and two tigers have been killed in the last twenty months in the forests of northern Bengal. The deaths of elephants were caused in most cases by speeding trains. The problem of
human-animal conflict is increasingly featuring in the media and in discussions. Interestingly, human-animal conflict has a rich history and dates back to the pre-historic times.
As we hurtle headlong into the twenty-first century creating technologies, breathing development, and grabbing land and resources, most of us will readily acknowledge that we may be harming the natural world by our actions and that we must do what we can to correct this. Judging from the enthusiastic
How is it possible for large carnivorous cats to live with humans in a rural area? Asking this big question are Vidya Athreya, a wildlife
biologist and Sunetro Ghosal, a social scientist.
Based on our studies in Norway and India, and the rapidly expanding scientific literature in this field, it is safe to say that human-wildlife conflicts are a universal state of affairs. This is a serious issue because it represents a long term threat to the persistence of wildlife as well as negatively affecting the lives of millions of people. Our conflict research is motivated by a desire to identify paths towards conflict reduction and mitigation, for the benefits of both people and wildlife.
A millennium later, the range of devices that farmers use to keep elephants at bay is a tribute to the ingenuity of both, animals and humans. In parts of elephant country, farmers complain that none of the commonly used methods such as torch lights and bursting fire crackers work anymore.
Over the last several millennia, people have made steady inroads into the elephants’ natural habitat through agriculture and settlements along river valleys. With their habitats now fragmented, degraded and compressed, these mega-herbivores spill into human settlements thereby setting the stage for a highly volatile combat.
A hundred years ago, humans almost exterminated all large mammals in Norway. Government protection has since ensured the overwhelming return of species, only to result in a newer problem: CONFLICT.
