Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation Impacts Community Perceptions around Kibale National Park, Uganda

Lev Kolinski,Krista M Milich

doi:10.3390/d13040145

Abstract

The attitudes of community members living around protected areas are an important and often overlooked consideration for effective conservation strategies. Around Kibale National Park (KNP) in western Uganda, communities regularly face the threat of crop destruction from wildlife, including from a variety of endangered species, such as African elephants (Loxodonta africana), common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and red colobus monkeys (Piliocolobus tephrosceles), as well as other nonhuman primates, including olive baboons (Papio anubis). These frequent negative interactions with wildlife lead many community members to resent the park and the animals that live within it. To mitigate these issues, community members around KNP partnered with researchers to start a participatory action research project to reduce human-wildlife interactions. The project tested four sustainable human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategies: digging and maintaining trenches around the park border, installing beehive fences in swampy areas where trenches could not be dug, planting tea as a buffer, and growing garlic as a cash crop. These physical exclusion methods and agriculture-based deterrents aimed to reduce crop destruction by wild animals and improve conditions for humans and wildlife alike. We conducted oral surveys with members of participating communities and a nonparticipating community that border KNP to determine the impact of these sustainable human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategies on attitudes toward KNP, wildlife officials, and animal species in and around KNP. We found that there is a positive correlation between participation in the project and perceived benefits of living near KNP. We also found that respondents who participated in the project reported more positive feelings about the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the organization that oversees KNP. This research will help inform future conservation initiatives around KNP and other areas where humans and animals face conflict through crop damage.

Highlights

We investigated three main questions: (1) what are the attitudes of community members toward Kibale National Park (KNP), animals in the park, and wildlife conservation, (2) is there a correlation between these attitudes and exposure to human-wildlife conflict (HWC), and (3) how does participation in a participatory action research project to decrease human-wildlife interactions impact these attitudes? We predicted that participation in the participatory action research project led to decreased incidence of HWC and improved perceptions of wildlife, the park, and park officials
While some respondents cited other forms of HWC as problems associated with living near KNP, such as disease affecting humans and livestock and/or livestock depredation, most respondents reported crop raiding as a problem associated with living near KNP
Our findings suggest that participation in a participatory action research project with agriculture-based deterrents and physical exclusion methods reduced the perceived incidences of HWC around KNP and the perceptions of the people who live near the park about KNP, wildlife, and wildlife officials may have improved with this decrease in HWC

Summary

Introduction

In regions where humans and animals overlap, direct competition over access to resources commonly results in human-wildlife conflict (HWC), a phenomenon that is increasing in severity each year as humans expand into and extract resources from more and more wild areas [1,2]. In areas where community members farm for subsistence, the results of HWC in the form of crop consumption and damage by wildlife can be especially harmful, as animals can destroy households’ sole sources of income and food. As a response to this threat of crop loss, community members will sometimes resort to violence against the animals, including killing them to protect their resources [5]. Killing wildlife on subsistence farms can have consequences that radiate far beyond the incident of HWC; it can decrease biodiversity, in effect, disrupting the entire ecosystem [6]

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