Human dimensions of coexistence with lions: attitudes, wellbeing and economic valuation

Interactions between people and large carnivores often entail serious consequences for both: killing by people is among the top threats to large carnivore populations, and attacks on livestock and people by predators threaten lives and livelihoods. In order to understand and alleviate human-wildlife conflict, it is important to understand these interactions from the perspectives of the people involved. There have been repeated calls for improved understanding of the non-material aspects of human-wildlife conflict, but these are still poorly understood. Using ordinal logistic regression models, I investigate the importance of a range of tangible and intangible factors on attitudes to coexisting with lions (Panthera leo) among subsistence farmers, including the costs and benefits of wildlife presence, emotion, culture, religion, vulnerability, risk perception, notions of responsibility and personal value orientations. I found intangible factors to be as important as tangible factors in understanding attitudes to coexisting with lions in agro-pastoral communities on the border of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Fear emerges as the variable with the highest effect size in the attitude models. The degree to which benefits accrue to households from the nearby protected area was also highly influential, as was the numbers of livestock lost, perceived risk of lion encounters, age, number of dependants, ecocentric value-orientation, and participation in conflict mitigation programmes. Depredation of livestock is often assumed to be the crux of human-carnivore conflict, but metrics of livestock loss did not dominate attitudes to coexistence with lions. I raise questions about the widespread reliance on socio-economic variables in the field of human-wildlife conflict and coexistence, as some such variables appeared to be spuriously associated with attitude when used in isolation. Economic valuation allows for the quantification of the total value of carnivore presence from the perspective of the local communities, including the impact of intangible factors. I found that the total value of an additional lion was negative USD180 per person per year, which is several hundred times larger than the market value of the average per capita loss of livestock. Under the assumptions of simplifying economic theory, this discrepancy reveals that the value of the material losses, which has been the only quantitative data available for compensation schemes and conservation actions so far, substantially underestimates the total costs experienced by the communities that live in the closest proximity to predator populations. However, there are substantial uncertainties around the cognitive process used to relate costs to probability of loss, and around risk perception. The impact of carnivore presence can also be quantified through wellbeing analyses. By calculating the marginal rate of substitution between the effect of wealth wellbeing and the effect of experiencing livestock loss on wellbeing, I estimate economic value of this impact to be USD5800 annually per person. Fear of lions had an equivalent effect on the wellbeing of the people living alongside lions to experiencing livestock loss. Compensating economically for the full costs experienced in association with the presence of lions would entail substantial cost. Furthermore, conservation practitioners or wildlife managers would have to rethink who they provide compensation for – traditional compensation schemes compensate livestock owners, but the intangible harms of carnivore presence are not limited to people who own livestock. This greatly increases the scope and cost of compensation schemes and initiatives that aim to incentivise tolerance towards wildlife by generating financial benefits. However, it is difficult to envision successful mitigation of human-wildlife conflict without operating with a clear picture of the total costs experienced and perceived by the people who live alongside wildlife.

Keywords: wellbeing
conservation
Zimbabwe
lions
economic valuation
valuation
subjective wellbeing
human-wildlife conflict and coexistence
Advisor: Macdonald, DW
Dickman, AJ
Loveridge, AJ