Human behavior and biodiversity conservation in tropical systems: mobility, livelihoods, and wildlife conflict at multiple scales

Abstract

Supporting human wellbeing and household livelihoods while conserving biodiversity and managing natural resources are challenges of global scale and importance. Across tropical regions, trade-offs between people and nature are most acute near the borders of strictly protected biodiversity areas. This dissertation consists of three studies that investigate the behavior or rural people, paying particular attention to mobility, how conservation strategies affect communities, and how people’s livelihood decisions influence social and natural environments. Chapter one examines a recent discussion debating the extent of human in-migration around protected areas in the tropics. One proposed argument is that rural migrants move to bordering areas to access conservation outreach benefits. A counter-proposal maintains that protected areas have largely negative effects on local populations and that outreach initiatives even if successful present insufficient benefits to drive in-migration. Using data from Tanzania, we examined merits of statistical tests and spatial methods used previously to evaluate migration near protected areas and applied hierarchical modeling with appropriate controls for demographic and geographic factors to advance the debate. Areas bordering national parks in Tanzania did not have elevated rates of in-migration. Low baseline population density and high vegetation productivity with low interannual variation rather than conservation outreach explained observed migration patterns. More generally we argue that to produce results of conservation policy significance, analyses must be conducted at appropriate scales, and we caution against use of demographic data without appropriate controls when drawing conclusions about migration dynamics. Chapter two examines conservation strategies and the challenges of protecting biodiversity while also supporting household livelihoods. Across the tropics, efforts focus on balancing trade-offs in local communities near the borders of protected areas. Devolving rights and control over certain resources to communities is increasingly considered necessary, but decades of attempts have yielded limited success and few lessons on how such interventions could be successful in improving livelihoods. We investigated a key feature of household well-being, the experience of food insecurity, in villages across Tanzania’s northern wildlife tourist circuit. Using a sample of 2,499 primarily livestock-keeping households we compared food insecurity in villages participating in the country’s principal community-based conservation strategy with nearby control areas. We tested whether community-based projects could offset the central costs experienced by households near strictly protected areas (i.e. frequent human–wildlife conflict and restricted access to resources). We found substantial heterogeneity in outcomes associated with the presence of community-based conservation projects across multiple project sites. Although households in project villages experienced more frequent wildlife conflict and received few provisioned benefits, there is evidence that these households may have been buffered to some degree against negative effects of wildlife conflict. We interpret our results in light of qualitative institutional factors that may explain various project outcomes. Tanzania, like many areas of conservation importance, contains threatened biodiversity alongside areas of extreme poverty. Our analyses highlight the need to examine more precisely the complex and locally specific mechanisms by which interventions do or do not benefit wildlife and local communities. Finally, chapter three examines how rural farmers and livestock keepers use mobility as an adaptive livelihood strategy. Continued migration to and within frontier areas is largely viewed as a driver of environmental decline and biodiversity loss. Recent scholarship advances our understanding of migration decision-making in the context of changing climate and environments, and in doing so it highlights the variation in migration responses to largely economic and environmental factors. Building on these insights, this letter investigates past and future migration decisions in a frontier landscape of Tanzania, East Africa. Combining field observations and household data within a multilevel modelling framework, this letter analyses the explicit importance of social factors relative to economic and environmental factors in driving migration decisions. Results indeed suggest that local community ties and non-local social networks drive both immobility and anticipated migration, respectively, for different households. In addition, positive interactions with local protected natural resource areas promote longer-term residence. Findings are interpreted in light of how the migration literature understands changing frontier areas as they transition to human dominated landscapes. Doing so highlights critical links between migration behaviour and the conservation of biodiversity and management of natural resources, as well as how migrants evolve to become integrated into communities.