It has been six years since the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict Task Force was founded and this April we were pleased to announce that the group was appointed to be a permanent Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. It is now called the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group, reflecting also a clarification of our remit: conflict and coexistence are two sides of the same coin, which interact and need to be understood together. Meanwhile, following on from our Learning in Practice webinar in 2021, we published the first three case studies from this activity in collaboration with the FAO. We have also been busy supporting efforts to ensure that human-wildlife conflict is included in the UN CBD Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and attended meetings in Geneva in March. As always, we continue to update and expand our IUCN Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Library highlighting some featured articles below. As we continue our work now as a Specialist Group I look forward to sharing many more activities, resources and events in the future.
Dr Alexandra Zimmermann Chair
Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Library
In the last quarter, 40 publications were added to our document library in January, February and March. Publications include articles on a Theory of Change to identify logical pathways of action through which coexistence with large carnivores can be enhanced, the need to combine ecological and social research to inform conservation decisions and mediating human-wolf conflicts through dialogue, joint fact-finding and empowerment. On World Wildlife Day we also had an article published in the IISD SDG Knowledge Hub on how stakeholder engagement is crucial for successful species recovery. We've highlighted some articles below that made for interesting reading. For any missing items or to suggest a topic or species page to be added to the library, please let us know here.
IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group
We’re pleased to announce that the IUCN SSC Steering Committee has appointed the Task Force as a permanent Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. We will now be called the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group. This reflects the clarification of our remit which focuses on both conflict and coexistence with and about wildlife, and our growing role as a permanent international advisory body of IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. You can find out more here.
In March, our Chair attended the Convention on Biological Diversity meetings in Geneva, Switzerland, at which parties negotiated the text of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework ahead of COP15. Human-wildlife conflict is included in the First Draft of the Framework. There has been much discussion about the placement of human-wildlife conflict in the text, as well as the placement of human-wildlife conflict in the Framework. Crucial to this process is the development of indicators for parties to be able to monitor and measure human-wildlife conflict and progress against the target. To this end, we provided input and an information document on the development of indicators which can be found here.
Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Case Studies
In collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), we have been developing case studies on human-wildlife conflict and coexistence to illustrate key principles of human-wildlife conflict management and complement the IUCN SSC Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence that are currently in preparation.
The first three case studies were published on World Wildlife Day in March to highlight key aspects of community engagement processes and the ethics of engagement from case studies in Guyana, India and Tanzania. All three case studies can now be found in our new page in the Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Library. We will be publishing more case studies in the coming months.
