Tag: #human impacts on forest

Human-wildlife conflict has Climate Change as an emerging Factor

In 2015, the largest marine heat wave in the U.S. hit the Pacific Coast. Whales moved closer to shore to find prey, but they came across something dangerous—they were getting entangled in crab fishing gear.

Crab fishermen and women wouldn’t usually be out at that time of year. But the change in climate was also causing an algal bloom, toxic to crabs. So the fisheries delayed their timing by several months—the same time migrating whales were on the coast.


“It was this double-whammy,” said Briana Abrahms, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and Center for Ecosystems Sentinels at the University of Washington.

This was one of the topics Abrahms was studying when she realized there hadn’t been much published research on how climate change is exacerbating human-wildlife conflicts. Looking at scientific literature and government reports, she came across only a few dozen. And many of those were either buried in obscure journals or just anecdotal mentions.


In a paper published in Science, she delved deeper into this area and wrote a call to action for managers and researchers to focus on this issue.Abrahms was working on another project at the same time as her whale research that was on completely different species in a completely different area, but seemed to have some similarities when it came to climate and conflict.

In Botswana, a government report cited some of the highest numbers of human-wild conflicts on record, mostly large carnivores preying on livestock. That happened to be during an extreme drought in 2018. “It struck me how different these systems were, but the story was the same,” she said. “I felt like it was really important to tell this story and draw attention since these climate changes and conflicts are likely to increase in the future.”



As part of her paper, Abrahms applauded a new, proactive risk assessment developed by the state of California to help managers figure out when and where to close fisheries under different climate and ocean conditions. “If you understand what the underlying driver is, in this case climate is a factor in these dynamics, you can better prepare to make management decisions and reduce conflict—or avoid it in the first place,” she said.


Abrahms also pushes for more research in these areas, especially where there are geographic and taxonomic gaps. “We definitely need more research and also need to be synthesizing research across everything already out there to understand how much we should be more worried about long-term changes,” she said.

The problem of poverty in India

In India, poverty is presently estimated by fixing a poverty line based on a differentiated calorie-norm. This means that the level of poverty depends upon the capacity of a person to purchase food and a person who can buy specific amount of food to cross the poverty line margin for nutrients and calorie intake is above the poverty line. Whereas, the person who cannot buy enough food to meet the required nutrition value of calories and carbohydrates is below the poverty line. This level is not the correct parameter to check the level of poverty.

A task force of the Planning Commission in 1979 defined the poverty line as that per capita expenditure at which the average per capita per day calorie intake was 2400 calories in rural areas and 2100 calories in urban areas. Average per capita expenditures incurred by that population group in each State which consumed these quantities of calories, as per the 1973-74 survey of NSSO, were used as the poverty lines.

The debate on the extent of poverty in India has been a matter of global interest in the recent years. The primary reason for the global interest in the debate is that the levels of poverty in India and China have come to exert significant influence over the trends in world poverty itself.

Within India too, there has been growing contestation around poverty estimates, particularly in the period of economic reforms. First, there are persistent disagreements among economists on whether the rate of poverty decline after economic reforms was slower than in the preceding period. Secondly, the shift to targeted, rather than universal, welfare schemes has witnessed the use of poverty estimates to decide on the number of households eligible to access these schemes. The report of the Expert Group on the estimation of poverty, chaired by Suresh Tendulkar, is the latest input to the “Great Indian Poverty Debate.”

It is to be noted here that many subsidies and programs are launched by the government but these additional increments do not reach the actual people that are in need of them. Instead it is sent back to the businessman and thus a lot of profit is earned on these subsidized goods. Thus, to lower the level of poverty in India, schemes have to be launched in order to directly benefit the people in need.

The Hindu states that, “A final issue with the report, of much long-term consequence, relates to the wisdom of abandoning the calorie norm. It is indeed true that the levels of calorie intakes are not well correlated with nutritional outcomes. However, abandoning the calorie norm altogether and taking solace from the fortuitous fact that calorie intakes appear adequate at the new poverty lines is an arbitrary proposition. It is unclear whether there is any basis, theoretical or empirical, for this relationship to hold true across time.”

the Tendulkar Committee has pitched for a policy position that is stranded between the harsh realities of poverty in India and the fiscal conservativeness of a neo-liberal framework. The real challenge lies in preserving the positives from the report, and strongly persisting with the demand for a universal social security system.

– Ananya Kaushal