ConFooBio resolving human-wildlife food conflicts
UK scientist Dr Nils Bunnefeld, of the University of Stirling, Scotland, has received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to investigate how humans and wildlife can successfully co-exist.
The five-year, £1.1m (~€1.4m), international ConFooBio project aims to solve the conflict between the parties promoting biodiversity conservation and ensuring food security by producing a new model to both predict and resolve these conflicts.
“Each year governments across the world pay out millions of pounds in compensation to farmers for crops destroyed by birds and mammals. In developing countries an entire community’s annual crops can be ruined overnight by elephants, and there is an ongoing debate on the importance to economies of producing farmed salmon at the expense of preserving wild salmon,” says Bunnefeld.
“These conflicts are difficult to resolve; even at the highest levels there is usually a winner and a loser, and in many cases negotiations are stalled. Creating a process that achieves a positive resolution for all the parties involved is our goal. We will do this by using our existing expertise, extensive field research, as well as combining for the first time a range of academic approaches from social sciences, economics and ecology.”
Bunnefeld and his team will set up research bases to examine communities as diverse as Gabon, central Africa; Norway; Sweden; Denmark; and Orkney, Scotland, with the hope of producing outcomes that protect both livelihoods and wildlife.
Drivers for the research include the increasing impact of climate change, mitigating conflicts between food production and biodiversity, increasing the economic benefits of tourism and ensuring the protection of endangered species.
The created model will be used by such agencies as the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and Scottish Natural Heritage.
