The Rio Declaration Human-Elephant Conflict Case Study

Introduction

To survival, humans have always been exploited the environment around them. The global population increase and technology improvement cause the increase of natural resources exploitation and lands transformation. The high demand for natural resources and lands are causing the degradation or reduction of the natural ecosystem, which is also wildlife’s food resources and habitats. This creates conflicts between human and wildlife. To reduce that trend and the increase of human-wildlife conflicts, national policies and international treaties have been signed to emphasize protection of the last remaining natural environment to allow coexistence between human and wildlife on the healthy landscape. That is a case of the Rio Declaration
For humans, this conflict can lead to increased poverty, less food to feed families, and even death for humans. For wildlife, these conflicts can lead to habitat scarcity, increased mortality, and even extirpation or global extinction (Naughton-Treves, 1997; Madden, 2007; Parker & Osborn, 2006). This risk of extinction is already ongoing with the increase of poaching due to high international ivory traffic. This poaching obliges elephants to find refuge near humans’ settlement; Central Africa is maybe the last refuge for forest elephants against poaching (Breuer, Maisels, & Fishlock, 2016). This situation pushes the classification of forest elephant as an endangered species (Blanc, 2008). Even though this region has very low population density, the increase of forest exploitations changes elephant’s habitat that pushes them near human too. This approach of elephants to human livelihood creates one of the main human-wildlife conflicts in this region, particularly in Gabon (Walker, 2012) which has the lowest population density in the
My dissertation will improve these limitations by looking at HEC at the landscape-scale strategies with the inclusion of all stakeholders, such as rural community, park ranger, and tourism agency , to the planning process. Then this thesis project would like to contribute to framework development through landscape planning research for human-elephant conflict resolution. Landscape planning is a holistic view of the forest as elephant habitat and food resources. Landscape planning research will approach the HEC by focusing on the interrelationship between elephant and forest (IEF). The focus on this interaction will allow 1) to identify the nutritional quality of foods around bais and fruiting that forest elephants consume across seasons; 2) to understand forest elephants movements between these sites without human pressure such as poaching or logging activities. This knowledge will be combined with rural community knowledge and scientific based study to improve elephants’ hotspots, which are bais or area around fruiting trees. The sought objective is to reduce elephant crop raiding. Through landscape strategy, criteria will be defined with stakeholders' contribution to identifying hotspots that could be surcharged with food resource , particularly the most nutritious foods, to create a hub for elephant. The hub will be a network of improved hotspots, which should suite