Finding politically feasible conservation policies: the case of wildlife trafficking

Authored by Timothy C Haas, Sam M Ferreira

Date Published: 2018

DOI: 10.1002/eap.1662

Sponsors: World Wildlife Fund South Africa

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Flow charts Pseudocode

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Conservation management is of increasing importance in ecology as most ecosystems nowadays are essentially managed ecosystems. Conservation managers work within a political-ecological system when they develop and attempt to implement a conservation plan that is designed to meet particular conservation goals. In this article, we develop a decision support tool that can identify a conservation policy for a managed wildlife population that is both sustainable and politically feasible. Part of our tool consists of a simulation model composed of interacting influence diagrams. We build, fit, and use our tool on the case of rhino horn trafficking between South Africa and Asia. Using these diagrams, we show how a rhino poacher's belief system can be modified by such a policy and locate it in a perceived risks-benefits space before and after policy implementation. We statistically fit our model to observations on group actions and rhino abundance. We then use this fitted model to compute a politically feasible conservation policy.

Tags

individual-based models Market Biodiversity population conservation management Model National-park Legal trade International-trade Anti-poaching policies Conservation politics Decision-making models Rhinoceros poaching Socio-ecological models Statistical fitting of ecological models Wildlife trafficking Ecosystem management Militarization Horn