2 - The impact of human–wildlife conflict on human lives and livelihoods

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Human populations interact with wildlife in numerous ways. Our species has directly exploited wild animals for food and furs for millennia and more recently for sporting or cultural reasons. Humans have greatly modified habitats and landscapes through agriculture and other extractive industries with far-reaching and typically negative impacts on wildlife populations. We have also translocated species around the globe, either deliberately or accidentally, with major consequences for native fauna. From the human perspective, our interactions with wildlife are often positive – we gain material benefit from harvesting species for food or other animal products. In other situations, however, human interactions with wildlife are negative. Wild animals may eat our livestock and damage our crops, they may compete with us as hunters for wild prey populations, and they may even injure or kill us. In the previous chapter, we outlined the negative consequences for wildlife that come into conflict with people, focussing on the global and local extirpations and range contractions suffered by a variety of predators and crop-raiders. Here in this second scene-setting chapter, we summarize the negative impacts of threatened wildlife on people. Focussing again on predators and crop-raiders we assess the costs to stakeholders of living with wildlife. We focus on the direct costs to stakeholders of living with wildlife such as loss of human life, livestock, wildlife resources and crops and try to calculate these in financial terms.