Abstract
Conflicts between humans and wildlife over farmland crops and livestock are a major sustainability issue, increasing biodiversity loss and threatening human livelihoods. Land-use change intensifies such conflicts by creating novel interactions to which neither humans nor wildlife are adapted. Current efforts to mitigate human-wildlife conflicts ignore not only the role of both ecological and social responses to land-use change in shaping conflict, but also the presence of time-delays in these responses, resulting in the limited success of conflict mitigation. This project will innovatively assess how past land-use change, through delayed ecological and social responses, affects human-wildlife conflicts using landscapes in Ethiopia as an example. The project builds upon my experience as an interdisciplinary researcher of human-environment interactions. I will analyse the influence of past land-use change along a land-use history gradient, with survey sites differing in their timing of conversion from forest to farmland (1973 to recent). Surveyed effects include delayed responses to land-use change of current mammal populations (extinction debts) and local people’s values (value-change debts). Camera traps will be used to study mammal diversity and community composition, and local people’s values will be surveyed through interviews. I will then integrate and relate these responses to three measures of conflict with mammals: conflict intensity, conflict diversity, and people’s tolerance towards conflict. This research will be the first to demonstrate the effects of social-ecological legacies on human-wildlife conflicts. Results will provide a better understanding of what drives conflict and highlight problems and opportunities of human-wildlife co-adaptation. I will make the research directly relevant for local stakeholders through their engagement in the research and through visioning workshops aimed at designing novel solutions to mitigate conflict. As wildlife conflicts are an increasing problem in farming landscapes worldwide, the integrated, historically-rooted approach demonstrated here will include valuable insights for conflict mitigation elsewhere.
Netherlands