“Let us stop talking about human-wildlife conflict. Some of us live with this reality and we pay a heavy price for sharing space with wildlife.”
The remark, made at the 2023 Community-led Conservation Congress in Namibia, challenges how conservation is often described. The term “human-wildlife conflict” appears frequently in policy and reporting, suggesting a problem that can be managed. For those living closest to wildlife, it is less abstract. It includes fatal encounters, like the one described by the same speaker, and more routine losses that shape daily life.
A pastoralist in East Africa described taking out a loan to farm after livestock losses made herding unreliable. He planted tomatoes and hired guards to watch the fields at night. When heavy rain delayed the harvest, elephants entered and consumed the crop. The loss included not only the harvest, but the loan and the labor behind it.
Across conservation landscapes, such experiences accumulate. They include guarding fields, avoiding certain routes, and adjusting routines in response to risk. The costs are local and immediate. The benefits of conservation—ecosystems preserved, species protected, carbon stored—are broader and more diffuse.
This asymmetry has deep roots. Protected areas have often been established through processes that restricted access to land and resources or displaced communities altogether. “How can someone that has never lived in our land know how to care for it?” asks the Laboot Declaration issued by East African Indigenous groups in 2022.
Efforts to address these tensions are growing. Compensation schemes, grievance mechanisms, and conflict mitigation strategies are now common. In the Central African Republic, a human rights center has helped residents access legal support and report abuses. But implementation remains inconsistent, and support often falls short of actual losses.
In some regions, locally rooted approaches—such as community-based lion monitoring—have reduced conflict while maintaining cultural ties to land. Elsewhere, traditional systems have been disrupted by conservation policies that redefine land use and authority.
Global targets to expand protected areas will require decisions that affect millions. If current patterns persist, the burden will continue to fall on those least able to absorb it. For those living with wildlife, the cost of coexistence is cumulative and enduring, shaping how conservation is experienced on the ground.
Whether conservation can hold under these conditions remains uncertain.
The full piece, Living with wildlife, bearing the cost, is published on Mongabay. It is part III of a three-part series on “The Human Side of Conservation.” Also see:
Conservation depends on rangers. Their wellbeing is often an afterthought
