Improving Our Collective Efforts to Prevent and Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a serious obstacle to wildlife conservation worldwide and is becoming more prevalent as human populations increase, development expands, the global climate changes and other human and environmental factors put people and wildlife in greater direct competition for a shrinking resource base.

Improving our responses to HWC requires greater consultation not only among wildlife professionals and between their organizations, but also with economic and social development organizations, land use planners, agribusiness, and other key decision makers. Successful responses to conservation conflicts frequently require individual professionals to reach outside their own disciplines for needed tools, skills and perspectives. Interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as collaboration between sectors, is critical to improving the understanding of underlying causes needed to shift the emphasis from reactive mitigation of conflict to proactive prevention strategies.

The Human-Wildlife Conflict Collaboration is pioneering efforts to facilitate collaborative learning among diverse partners so that we may improve our collective ability to address the root causes of conservation conflicts. HWCC is unique in that it provides a neutral global forum upon which to convene the individuals, institutions and sectors working on or affected by conflict in conservation. Through this forum and our collaborative work, we will help wildlife professionals and key decision makers shift our efforts from a reactive mitigation of human-wildlife conflict to a proactive, prevention of all conservation conflicts.

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