Background

CARE International has been working for many years in south-west Uganda around the Queen Elizabeth, Bwindi Impenetrable and Mgahinga Gorilla National Parks, implementing a wide range of initiatives aimed at addressing and managing the conflicts over the use and management of protected areas. For poor natural resource dependent households with farms adjacent to protected areas, crop and property loss to wildlife has a major impact on livelihoods in south west Uganda and elsewhere. Much of CARE’s work has been focussed on developing ways of increasing benefits and reducing costs of biodiversity conservation to these frontline communities, thereby achieving a better balance between improving local livelihoods and protecting areas of outstanding biodiversity. However, while these issues have been addressed by many integrated conservation and development initiatives around the world, information and lessons learnt from these experiences is not easily accessible. The aim of this project was therefore to gather and analyse international experience on addressing the impacts of wildlife on protected area adjacent communities, and to recommend best practices to help mitigate human-wildlife conflicts in south-west Uganda.

Our contribution

In collaboration with the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation (www.itfc.org), CDC provided technical support for a review of human-wildlife conflicts and solutions in south-west Uganda and around the world. This involved: establishing a knowledge base format and information collection criteria to ensure that the most relevant information was collected; identifying sources of international experience on human-wildlife conflicts, their solutions and the lessons learned from commodity-based enterprises linking poverty reduction with biodiversity conservation; and, based on these findings, collating information on best practices from around the world. We identified and recommended a range of practical and tested solutions to human-wildlife conflicts, and outlined criteria for assessing how, why, where, when and under what conditions these solutions can work well. In addition to international research, locally conducted research was used in communities adjacent to the focal protected areas as a basis for further understanding the scope of the problem and the challenges to devising sustainable solutions in south-west Uganda. The findings of this research were presented to the major institutional stakeholders, and pilot interventions were identified and planned.

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