Human-wildlife conflict in the community forestry landscape: a case study from two Middle Hill districts of Nepal

ABSTRACT

Our current understanding of human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) is limited beyond protected areas. This article investigated HWC in community-forestry (CF) landscape in two Middle Hill districts of Nepal, where community forests and agriculture are mosaicked. We used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and geospatial tools to examine economic losses to local farmers from HWC and their associated factors. We found that 47% of the cropland parcels experienced crop-raiding, and 29% of the households lost livestock to wild-animals in the study area. Livestock unit, distance to forests, household elevation, and number of neighboring households were identified as the significant factors associated with livestock depredation, while crop-raiding was strongly related to distance from parcels to forest edges, walking distance from home to parcels, elevation, crop type and the number of crop rotation. After examining existing policies for HWC mitigation, we found loopholes that need to be patched up in CF landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Crop-raiding
• livestock depredation
• wildlife
• community forestry
• logistic regression
• Nepal

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the community people for their time in participating in this study. We thank Shanti Shrestha, Rahul Karki, Dr. Clark Gray for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Comments and feedbacks received during the XXV IUFRO World Congress presentation was also helpful for refining this manuscript. Thanks are also given to two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by a US National Science Foundation grant (ICER-2108238) and the UNC-USFS joint-venture program (16-JV-11330155-058) and the Stephen Birdsall Summer Fellowship awarded to the first author in the Department of Geography at UNC Chapel Hill, and an UNC internal grant awarded to Dr. Conghe Song.