African Conservation Centre, Nairobi, Kenya.
Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.
PLoS One. 2020 Sep 18;15(9):e0239545. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239545. eCollection 2020.
Human-elephant conflict is an often intractable problem that threatens the contribution of conservation interventions to human wellbeing and securing livelihoods in Africa and Asia. Local human populations living in key elephant ranges are among the world's most poor and vulnerable people. In efforts to address this problem, previous studies have mainly focused on the direct impacts of conflict and applied standard regression models based on the assumption of individual-level homogeneity. More recently, human-elephant conflict has been seen to extend well beyond the physical, to the psychological and social sides of wellbeing. However, the impacts on human wellbeing have not been robustly explored, especially for local communities co-existing with elephants. We evaluated the impacts of conflicts on the wellbeing of local communities around the world-famous Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. We conducted 18 focus group discussions with 120 community members in different locations and administered a questionnaire survey to 367 sampled households from 26 sub-locations in Trans Mara. We used descriptive statistics with appropriate statistical tests, including propensity score matching, to evaluate the impacts of conflict on human wellbeing. Before matching, the results of the descriptive statistics showed differences between households experiencing conflicts and those without in terms of gender, age, education level, household size, benefiting from elephant conservation, main occupation and number of income sources. Our matching results indicate the existence of a significant negative and positive impacts on four and one of our eight wellbeing indicators for households that experienced conflicts, respectively. Better conflict mitigation approaches and conservation policies need to be adopted to realize the harmonious and concurrent development of ecological and wellbeing objectives.
人与象冲突是一个棘手的问题，威胁着保护干预措施对人类福祉的贡献，以及在非洲和亚洲保障生计。生活在关键象区的当地人口是世界上最贫穷和最脆弱的人群之一。为了解决这个问题，以前的研究主要集中在冲突的直接影响上，并基于个体层面同质的假设应用标准回归模型。最近，人们已经认识到，人与象冲突远远超出了身体层面，延伸到了福祉的心理和社会层面。然而，对于与大象共存的当地社区来说，其对人类福祉的影响还没有得到强有力的探讨。我们评估了冲突对肯尼亚著名马赛马拉国家保护区周围的当地社区福祉的影响。我们在不同地点与 120 名社区成员进行了 18 次焦点小组讨论，并在跨马拉的 26 个分区中对 367 个抽样家庭进行了问卷调查。我们使用描述性统计和适当的统计检验（包括倾向评分匹配）来评估冲突对人类福祉的影响。在匹配之前，描述性统计的结果表明，在经历冲突和没有经历冲突的家庭之间，在性别、年龄、教育水平、家庭规模、从大象保护中受益、主要职业和收入来源数量方面存在差异。我们的匹配结果表明，对于经历冲突的家庭，有四个福祉指标存在显著的负向影响，一个指标存在显著的正向影响。需要采取更好的冲突缓解方法和保护政策，以实现生态和福祉目标的和谐与并行发展。
