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Authors
Abstract(s)
Conservation focus has changed during the last decades, with the uprising of its human dimension, and finding tools to sustainably reconcile conservation and social goals has become a priority. Protected Areas (PAs) are the most common strategy worldwide for safeguarding biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services, but with people as part of the system, PAs may impact human livelihoods, particularly engendering a high risk of negative Human-Wildlife Interactions (HWI). HWI are not only a threat to livelihoods but also may risk failure of conservation efforts. Therefore, understanding what drives human vulnerability within PAs, and how PAs may serve as a tool to meet conservation and livelihood goals is an utmost necessity.
In this thesis, I explore the interactions between rural livelihoods, protected areas, and HWI in Mozambique. By applying the concept of livelihood vulnerability in the context of PAs, I provide empirical support that: i) household vulnerability increases the exposure to HWI, and HWI drives vulnerability of households in PAs; ii) other dimensions of vulnerability, such as climate variability, lack of livelihood strategies and weak social networks among households, are contributing to the overall household vulnerability across PAs, although some PA’s context-specific drivers are still influential; and iii) PAs managers need to improve bidirectional communication with communities to assure better inclusivity of communities in PAs management, which might improve its efficacy in preserving biodiversity; and iv) at the national scale, vulnerability determinants, as river density, modulate the effects of the most important drivers of HWI – forests cover and human density.
Overall, my research builds on a holistic view of livelihoods and their drivers, and their integration into protected areas management towards a more socially inclusive model of conservation. My results add to a growing body of evidence that social and conservation problems cannot be addressed separately, being often interdependent. First, by highlighting the value of considering HWI as a significant factor of exposure in vulnerability assessments and the integration of livelihood vulnerability in negative HWI mitigation strategies. Second, by evidencing that livelihood vulnerability and negative HWI are affected by social-ecological factors acting at different scales, highlighting that the relationship HWI-vulnerability acts beyond PAs, and cross-scale interventions and coordination might be needed. Lastly, the social networks of co-management processes and community-based strategies in Mozambique might benefit from fostering bidirectional communication between communities and PAs managers, to promote the active involvement of communities in conservation, with the expectation that with such bidirectional communications PAs can achieve more holistically the conservation goals they aim at.
Description
Keywords
Human-wildlife conflicts Livelihood Vulnerability Index Protected areas Rural communities Social-ecological systems