Human Wildlife Conflict

Growing human populations tend to increasingly overlap with wildlife worldwide, driving increased negative interactions with numerous costs for people livelihoods, wildlife and their habitat.

The mitigation of human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) appears as an essential issue in conservation, yet important knowledge gap remains to assess the causes and consequences of HWC and their impact on human societies and wildlife populations. With this in mind, researchers at GCC are interested in understanding the dimensions and main drivers of human-wildlife conflicts in different ecosystems in order to enhance coexistence in anthropogenic environments and improve local support for conservation. Our approach incorporates innovative interdisciplinary methodologies that integrate the sociological, psychological and ecological dimensions of the conflict. We focus particularly on human-carnivore conflicts in Kenyan drylands and Finnish forest ecosystems and on human-rat conflicts in Finnish urban areas.

Projects and Researchers

  • Human-carnivore conflicts in Northern Kenya / Miquel Torrents Ticó
  • Human and rat interactions in urban areas in Helsinki / Tuomas Aivelo
  • Cohabitation with undesired others in urban spaces – from theory to practice / Heta Lähdesmäki
  • Living with the other: more-than-human conflicts in urban allotment gardens / Karolina Lukasik

Key references

  • Torrents-Ticó, M., Broekhuis, F., Burgas Riera, D., Cabeza, M., Miliko, E., Komoi, T. T., & Fernández-Llamazares, Á. 2023. Using the centre-periphery framework to explore human-carnivore relations. Biological Conservation, 283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110125

  • Aivelo, T. 2023. School students’ attitudes towards unloved biodiversity: insights from a citizen science project about urban rats. Environmental Education Research, 29(1), 81-98. https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/wbehu, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2022.2140125

  • López-Baucells, A., Rocha, R., Andriatafika, Z., Tojosoa, T., Kemp, J., Forbes, C., Cabeza, M. 2017. Roost selection by synanthropic bats in rural Madagascar: what makes non-traditional structures so tempting? Hystrix, the Italian Journal of Mammalogy 28(1): 28-35.