Economic modeling approaches for wildlife and species conservation

This article has presented modelling approaches for wildlife and species conservation with a special emphasis on large mammals, in a developing country context, and with special reference to sub-Saharan Africa. In these countries there are frequently conflicts over land use and species conservation, and the institutions to tackle such conflicts are often weak or lacking. In addition, most of the world species and biodiversity are found in developing countries.

Two main issues are discussed. The first is a situation where the wildlife is valuable, but is considered a pest by the local people living close to the wildlife. For example, wildlife may damage agricultural crops or prey on livestock. The paper analyses this in a two-agent model, the actors being a local community and a protected area management agency.

In a second model the author considers models with a discrepancy between a management area and biological area, and where the species flows between a conservation area with no game harvesting and a neighbouring area with harvesting and possible habitat degradation.

The paper demonstrates that that wildlife conservation can work directly against the interests of the local people, while reducing damage to wildlife typically improves the degree of conservation as well as the living conditions of the community. The stylised natural resource models used here help to clarify some fundamental principles of wildlife conservation problems, which means policy implications are often fairly simple to understand. In more complex but also more realistic models the driving forces are often progressively more difficult to understand, and the policy implications harder to grasp. The paper concludes that in some instances such models are needed in order to better understand and explain the actual problem.