 So Holly, I will stop sharing my screen and if you can share your screen please we'll hand over to you for the first presentation. So hello everyone, wherever you are whatever time zone you're on I find it fun to connect with everyone around the world on a day when many of us were actually expecting to arrive in Oxford for the International Human Wildlife Conflict Conference and ironically we were actually planning on doing a very interactive session using some interesting software at that meeting and we seem to have succeeded one way or another although using a different bit of kit. So welcome everyone. I'm going to be talking about some things that are a little bit different than what we were intending for Oxford but I hope it will also be informational for all of you. Some time ago a group of us began to become sort of aware of the response to what was known and referred to as the poaching crisis and what we saw was that there was a tremendous reaction through law enforcement along the entire value chain and in addition to that an attempt to reduce demand for illegal products so a lot of projects began but one of the things we noticed was that far fewer things were beginning in terms of engaging with local communities and we really believed that to be somewhat of a shortcoming and something that needed to have further investigation because very much our view was that what it's all about is changing the relationship between people in wildlife and in changing it trying in whatever ways to achieve positive outcomes for both and in so doing as we began looking into this with a group of colleagues we really began to see that there was sort of what we call a basic equation and that was that the benefits from conserving wildlife minus the costs of conserving wildlife and we can never forget that there are many many costs to conserving wildlife and many of those are borne by local communities so we consider those to be the net benefits of conserving and these we thought had to remain greater than the benefits from engaging in illegal wildlife trade minus of course the costs of that engagement which in many many places around the world are still actually rather low because law enforcement efforts regardless of being pumped up still generally are falling behind the wave in terms of the activity of poaching and illegal trade at the local level so we started by putting together what we consider to be a rather basic theory of change and this didn't just come out of our heads this came out of an initiative we had called beyond enforcement where we were asking people from around the world to share with us what kinds of activities they had had and what sort of projects they had with local communities around the world to try and address the illegal wildlife trade issue and basically we came up with four key pathways and those are the first one being to increase the costs of participating in illegal wildlife trade to increase the incentives for stewardship and to decrease the costs of living with wildlife and lastly increasing non-wildlife based livelihoods now I could go into all of this in rather great depth but because we're focusing on human wildlife conflict I'm really going to put the focus of this talk into that area but just to let you know that what we discovered was the most important thing is where those orange circles lie and those are the assumptions that sit behind each of these pathways in terms of how we're using actions to get at decreasing the pressure on species from illegal wildlife trade so each pathway has this particular sort of layout starting at the bottom with enabling actions interventions and then the assumptions of those giving us outputs and then going into assumptions again the interim outcomes etc and in the end achieving the impacts that we're after so if I start on looking at this pathway pathway c we call it decreasing the cost of living with wildlife we began by working with communities to understand how they saw that as a part of the overall whole and just to give you a couple of examples we began and this is this I'm going to give two examples this is one of the communities that we worked with they felt that decreasing human wildlife conflict was the goal there at the bottom of that pathway and that to get to that next step of outputs there had to be a functioning and equitable distribution mechanism for compensation payments for wildlife damage and and that this money was not subject to elite capture and corruption these were two of their key assumptions next to get to that next level up that communities would be better able to mitigate wildlife conflict through feeling a decreased antagonism towards that wildlife and lastly at this that I'm going to go into is that communities as a result would experience a decreased cost of living with wildlife and have a decreased incentive to actively or tacitly support illegal wildlife trade so this was this is what came from one of the communities that we worked with this was not us coming up with it so we went to another community and we worked with them on their very same pathways but they had a totally different view of how to reduce the cost of living with wildlife they saw it more as a competition for grazing and that the major factor was to actually get at this competition so they felt that physical separation from the wildlife was needed to eliminate that competition and to reduce their feeling of antagonism towards towards the wildlife and these community again felt that by experiencing a decreased cost of living with the wildlife and they would have a decreased incentive to actively or tacitly participate and so that made them feel that they would be more willing to stand up against it so these were two very very different views and importantly if I put them together so that we can see them next to one another you'll see that at the bottom they had a different view of even the starting point how to begin they also had radically different views of where poaching sat in their overall views so for example the ones on the left they had a very concerted sort of effort around reducing poaching the ones on the right and you'll see at the very top they said that functioning and intact natural ecosystems were far more important to them and were their ultimate goal as opposed to just decreasing the pressure on on species so this is the reality of going out when you talk to people no sense in going into all the details here but everything in every box is different here so this was using the very same way of of communicating with communities and letting them express their voice and their experience so we have created a number of tools for this and I'll come on to later on how you can find these we've actually just begun well actually we're just finishing up with the southern african wildlife college who has taken it upon themselves to help us to design a further training module that will help people to learn how to implement these many tools that we have themselves in the field wherever they are wherever they're experiencing wherever they're engaging local communities so I thought it would be useful to just share a few lessons the first thing we found out and what really pushed us along the way was that many projects to date have actually failed in stemming human wildlife conflict or illegal wildlife trade and we believe this to be about no engagement with the communities from the start resulting in flawed assumptions and you'll remember that the assumptions being really the key focus point on this and that this has obviously led to some very deeply flawed theories of change underpinning project design so even though money might be going into working with local communities it doesn't seem to be having the effects wanted in many many projects so coming back to this again one of the things that I mentioned to you was that we would only be looking at decreasing the cost of living with wildlife but actually what we've discovered is that for communities simply giving benefits which is a very very typical part of projects and approaches by donors these days that that alone is not enough so you can continue to give incentives and benefits but you must also put energy in decreasing the cost of living with wildlife so it's not a situation where well we gave you a benefit therefore you should be you should be thankful and happy communities that we have interacted with feel that both are absolutely essential and that that comes back to solving the basic equation which we think is fundamental and that is again that the net benefits of conserving including of course the costs of human wildlife conflict whether it's mitigation or whether it's the costs of of separation or any other technique that they must must be greater than any of the net benefits of poaching and as we know that means there's a heavy load on the left hand side because there are a lot of benefits still to poaching what are the basic characteristics that the benefits should have well that the costs have to accrue where sorry the benefits have to accrue where the costs are incurred there are many programs now for biodiversity offsets and other types of offset offsets but when the benefits aren't actually arriving with the people who carry the cost they're not very influential obviously where revenues are actually earned from exercising rights over wildlife they have to be as close as a hundred percent to a hundred percent as possible we hear about a lot of places where small amounts of benefits are given five percent three percent sometimes they're not even financial and that's fine but where they do occur they should be as close to a hundred percent as possible in order to get the stewardship that we're after these benefits of course have to be equitably shared and there is much to be learned around that that corruption and elite capture must not must be minimized um to the greatest extent made impossible and that linking the accountability for demonstrated stewardship of wildlife is very very important in other words benefits should not come if we don't have clear ways of linking the stewardship to those benefits thirdly that it's not just about the benefits as I just said before that even where benefits are accrued by communities they still do not tolerate continued conflict well in some cases the communities may rely on local mitigation efforts and i'm sure we're going to hear a lot about that but they may not be adequate in other cases they may prefer physical separation but we have to be aware that when we begin to have physical separation even to the extent of fencing this is now going to cause other major knock-on effects and ecological impacts as we start to carve up the the landscapes but you know empowering communities and reducing the cost of living with wildlife can have much broader conservation benefits habitat loss and degradation still is a major threat even even when um species are threatened by human wildlife conflict and illegal wildlife trade habitat loss and degradation probably is still the greater effect and of course we have to reduce retaliatory killing for human wildlife conflict that's important and in some places it's still very very high um community based approaches though when taken in all these ways that we can learn primarily through working with the communities can result in rather than wildlife not being a part of greater landscape level systems that that can be removed and that wildlife can be a very very effective land use and that tolerance for the negative impacts of living with wildlife can be increased so just to end to say that you know we've done a lot of work on this level i've provided you there with a with a good link that can get you to our tools and many of the publications that we've had to date and i'll stop there and say thank you so much thanks a lot holly could you go back to the slide where you presented the two very different cases um to do with human wildlife conflict yeah that one could you so we've had just a few questions about this slide we were just wondering yeah brilliant so could you just explain what country you were talking about um what the community where the communities are um and what type of wildlife um are you talking about in relation to these two case studies so so i very specifically chose here two examples that are both in the same country and actually are among ethnic groups that are living the same lifestyle and are the same so they're both from kenya they occur in areas that are not very far away from one another um and the types of wildlife that are involved here are large large herbivores so elephants lots of grazing herbivores the wildebeest migrations come through this area and also of course all the large predators so these areas have lions leopards hyenas cheetahs they had they're experiencing all of that another question submitted was do you have any thoughts on strategies about how to manage a situation where the benefits of the legal wildlife trade are low for the majority of people that are so high for you people yeah i think that's a critical question and although i didn't directly address our our topic of enabling actions one of the very key things that we're finding is of course when it comes to costs and benefits you can have a situation where uh an individual is benefiting and the entire community takes a cost or when an individual is taking a cost such as through conflict and the community continues to benefit such as through tourism revenues and i think that what we find is that the best way to deal with this is to begin to have these very open conversations within the community so that these things become surfaced because what you don't see and what you would if you look at our tools is that when we get down to the assumptions a very critical thing that we ask is who is benefiting and who is taking the cost and that opens up the conversation very broadly we've had definitely even circumstances where people have been very more than willing to say there are people right here around this tree in this conversation who are benefiting from poaching while many of us are taking the costs of law enforcement so more or less the opening of the conversation of course is very very difficult if you don't have abilities to bring any of the poaching under control but if you go back and look at the the presentation again you'll see that pathway a was about disincentivizing involvement in illegal wildlife trade and we see that and every community we've worked with sees that as essential that you would have either state led law enforcement or community sanctions so community norms and standards or both active at the same time and all communities have believed that those things are also essential right Holly thank you and then in these two examples we've had a question do these two case studies have the same governance structure are they government run are they public private partnership could you tell us a little bit more about the governance arrangements that these two case studies right so these two case studies have completely different governance structures the one on the left has a structure that is all within the community itself they have several different different levels so they have a group that does management then they have a group that works on tourism they have another grouping that works on on conflict issues and they have one group that sort of brings the whole community together they do work with a group of external researchers but the researchers come in to answer the questions of the community it's a rather unusual place instead of the researchers coming in to tell them what they need research on they they invite them the one on the right hand side is a partnership between private sector and the local community in both cases the area that is under consideration in other words the very specific geographical location is demarcated on a map so they they do know where the boundaries are in both cases there are multiple villages involved there are somewhat different numbers of people involved but it's all in the thousands probably quite close actually but one would be a slight the one on the left is a larger area which has much less tourism in it much much less tourism the one on the right is a an area with much higher wildlife and much greater tourism i was going to say also that um when you go to to the website you can find um at least the one on the right has been written up and i think the one on the left is also up now as well so you can find these we wrote up very detailed case studies in francesca's absence holly just one question which has been coming up a lot in the q&a is about how to deal with entrenched corruption and delete capture um particularly in terms of the benefit sharing equation i don't know whether you want to comment on that yeah um you'll see that i brought up our general sort of theory of change here and down at the bottom you'll see fighting corruption and strengthening governance as as being one of the enabling actions and um of course everyone is is confronted with this and particularly in the very high value illegal wildlife trade chains and i think that what what many countries are finding is that the corruption is occurring actually further down the supply chain so as as different as different communities are feeding in product where those nodes are happening of of greater um really really more organized criminal networks so as opposed to just the elite capture at the site the elite capture that goes along the entire value chain of the trade when it comes to just local level i think what we've found is it's it's kind of practical in communities they generally are pretty well aware of who might be capturing more revenues than others i think would be the most honest thing to say in many of the communities that we've worked in they tend to feel that what goes around comes around that sometimes when people get a little bit too greedy then they get cut off and then another group starts so we haven't come across cases where people say look there's absolutely no corruption but what we have found is that where these more open and transparent systems of governance where where people come together and have a platform that there is much more ability to surface these issues when it gets of course to a step away from a community or two steps away this then becomes much more the realm of of national and perhaps provincial and local um state led law enforcement thanks holly could you once again just flash up where people can get more information on flood and what you've spoken about today because we have a lot of questions about how do we understand and use these tools so could you just share that before we move on i will just share that again and and just to say that we should be having this full fully fledged training module within the next couple of months of course you know the covid has hit us all we were actually scheduled in the next couple of weeks to be holding the piloting of our new tools so we're pretty far along and what we really really hope is that more and more people just um you know take the opportunity to look at these tools and see what benefits they can bring you because what we've found is that they've been an absolutely wonderful way of helping to bring community voice to the fore do you keep submitting your questions through the q&a and and we'll move on to libs presentation right so hi everyone and thank you so much for joining us today um so as francesca said my name is live wilson halt and i am the people not poaching coordinator and today i'm going to introduce people not poaching um take you through some of our case studies that are responding to the need to decrease the costs of living with wildlife as part of their anti poaching strategy as well as take you through some of the features we have on people not poaching um and how you can contribute so hopefully you're all a little bit familiar with what people not poaching is but essentially we are one component of a project led by iid called learning and action for community engagement against illegal wildlife trade or leap for short and leap is funded by the uk government's illegal wildlife trade challenge front so the aim of people not poaching or pnp is to build a global evidence base of initiatives that engage communities in tackling iwt and what we want to understand from these initiatives is what works what doesn't work and why in efforts that have involved or are involving communities in anti poaching activities so you can see our home page to the right here and on our website you can find plenty of background information on communities and iwt including um all the stuff that holly's just spoken about as well as case studies resources as well as relevant events so i'll be taking you through some of these features a little bit later on but for now we're going to focus on some of the case studies we have on the site that are decreasing the costs of living with wildlife for local communities around the world so we've got nearly a hundred case studies at the moment and in nearly a third of these 31 of 98 are responding to the need to reduce the costs of living with wildlife in order to reduce the motivation to carry out revenge killings or become involved in poaching activities so as holly discussed this is one of the four change pathways and underneath it sets the following activities so we've got preventative measures to deter wildlife reactive measures to deal with problem animals financial mitigation measures and the physical separation of people and all their livestock and wildlife so when you upload a case study you can select any number of these particular activities and we also give people the option to select other and provide any details they'd like and out of these activities 19 case studies are responding um by prevention of human wildlife conflict nine are undertaking activities that are reacting to human wildlife conflict eight are financially mitigating costs and seven are physically separating people and wildlife so as you might have guessed many of the case studies focus on elephants both in Africa and Asia as well as big cats such as tigers lions and snow leopards however we also have case studies on other species such as hippos and cockadiles in Africa and the cunea across the Andes and some are a little less predictable um such as whale sharks and nearly all of the case studies that mitigate human carnivore conflict have constructed predator proof enclosures to protect livestock and likewise crop raiding is often prevented through elephant safe stores and by planting non palatable crops in addition many initiatives have set up rapid response units and patrol programs to both ward off animals that stray onto human occupied landscapes and to react incidents quickly and effectively and other deterrents such as fences are common as is land use zoning particularly in areas with ranches or pastoralists now in terms of financial mitigation approaches compensation funds and insurance schemes such as a wildlife pay scheme and a predator compensation fund which are both in Kenya can be effective um particularly if communities are involved in their design and management so by reducing human wildlife conflict these initiatives hope to change attitudes attitudes about wildlife and conservation and subsequently reduce revenge killings and motivations for involvement in poaching activities and we've got some great examples of success as you'll hear about over the next few minutes so first up is a closer look at our case studies that respond to human snow leopard conflict now all of these projects are located in the mountainous regions of central Asia including Tajikistan, Mongolia and Afghanistan and in this region many communities depend entirely on livestock for their livelihoods making even one lost predation economically serious and this sometimes results in snow leopards killed due to human wildlife conflict being funneled into IWT as a way of compensating for the loss of livestock and as a way of earning extra income for example one project implemented by the community-based wildlife conservancies of Tajikistan estimates that as many as half of all snow leopard deaths in the area they work in are the direct consequence of human wildlife conflict so a common and immediate approach to mitigating conflict is to construct predator-proof livestock enclosures to prevent predation the project in Tajikistan has for example built 12 communal corals to protect about 8,000 sheep and goats plus any villages awaiting corals are provided with lights to deter snow leopards before the corals are constructed in Afghanistan the wildlife conservation society have also built 35 communal corals in the Wakkan corridor as well as making improvements to individual household corals now although these can be effective these initiatives also recognize that communities need a financial incentive to protect snow leopards and this is why the snow leopard trust implemented snow leopard enterprises in Mongolia in 1998 and the idea behind snow leopard enterprises is to provide herders with improved access to markets and to add value to handicrafts produced by local women in exchange for a conservation commitment aimed at protecting snow leopards from persecution and the incentive program was developed through discussions with herders and it works with snow leopard enterprises it works by snow leopard enterprises committing to purchase a number of handicrafts in return for herders committing to stop poaching snow leopards and their prey and as an added incentive any violation of the rules results in a loss of bonus for all participants and also a potential loss of program membership and this initiative has been really successful and between 1998 and 2003 there were no reports of snow leopards killed at any project sites and families can now increase their income by 40 and today snow leopard enterprises have expanded into kyrgyzstan pakistan and india reaching over 40 communities so on to elephants now which we know can be a major problem for communities in africa and asia and here nearly all of our case studies are adopting preventative measures in attempts to reduce human elephant conflict for example using chili bombs fences and blasts the use of proved grain stores and water supplies plus patrols to ward off animals away from crops and so nine of our case studies are decreasing the costs of living with elephants and i'm going to focus on two of these today the kina batangan orangutan conservation program in malaysia and conservation loa zambizi working on the border of zimbabwe and zambia so the kina batangan orangutan conservation program is run by a french NGO called hutan who recognized how the growing threat of human elephant conflict in malaysia and borneo was leading to an increase in poaching so in response they introduced a wildlife surveys and protection team to conduct night patrols and to maintain electric fencing which will help protect community crops they have also set up an elephant conservation unit with a group of villages which helps local farmers manage damage from crop raiding and the unit has been really successful in greatly reducing the extent of damage caused by elephants and over to africa and conservation loa zambizi who are working in the chiowa game management area where high incidents of human wildlife conflict has resulted in community resentment and retaliatory killings so the initiative therefore aims to address motivations for poaching and iwt the strategy includes patrols by village scouts as well as training and elephant behavior the construction of over 30 elephant safe granary stores and also chili farming which acts both as a deterrent and as a way to earn extra income with chili sold to a local condiment producer and in addition an anti-hippofence was erected to protect the crops of 20 farmers and levels of poaching in the area appear to have reduced and the key message from both of these initiatives is how important it is to provide support to communities in any projects that are aimed at protecting wildlife so human wildlife conflict isn't just confined to land and two of our case studies are working to conserve whale sharks that is sometimes caught in nets and subsequently killed by fishermen and in venezuela the shark research centre has been working with local communities to provide alternative livelihoods to reduce poaching as a whale shark fin can provide five times an average monthly salary and impoverished coastal communities have little other income opportunity so to help incentivize conservation they introduced compensation for damaged nets and encouraged fishermen to keep photographic and audio records of whale shark sightings so this was hoped that it would help also avoid the use of prohibited nets which were not subject to compensation however this proved to be a challenge as it was difficult to establish whether or not nets were in fact prohibited leading to anger amongst some fishermen overall however the project has been really successful with no whale sharks poached in the last 17 months and in india compensation for damaged nets proved to be a little more effective and to help verify claims the whale shark conservation project which is led by the wildlife trust of india has distributed over a thousand cameras to local fishermen to document whale shark releases which is a condition of them getting compensation for damaged nets so currently over 700 whale shark releases from nets have been documented and success has really been attributed to fishermen having responsibility for this documentation which has both resulted in more effective compensation process and puts less stress on the sharks during release so that is the case studies but while we're here we thought it would be a good idea to take you through some of the other features of pnp so along with the case studies and background information on communities and iwt we also have a number of different resources plus country profiles with relevant documents and also information on previous and upcoming events so as well as collecting case studies we also want to build a database of resources on communities and iwt and we currently have over 100 resources on the site and you can see a couple of recent uploads here which include a baseline report from our partners tnrf in tansania a video from project leader dillis and a recent journal article and as this shows resources can range from videos whether that is a TED talk or a presentation to a journal article and other publications to workshop reports and toolkits and all of these can be accessed from the explore tab on the website plus all of the key background and leak project documents such as the flawed initiative that holly was speaking about can also be found on our global context page and anyone is able to upload resources and we strongly encourage you to do so and i'll show you how you can do this in a few minutes time so we've also introduced a new feature called country profiles so these are intended to be a place where you can find all you need in terms of case studies resources as well as strategies policies legislation species action plans and so on for each country so here you can see the profile for zambia with some of the case studies that are located there and here we have some zambian strategy and policy documents that are relevant to iwt and communities so this feature is still in its early stages and we are slowly building these up for each country so it'd be really useful to get your feedback on these profiles as well as whether or not you think we are missing anything and lastly we have an events page for both previous and forthcoming events that are related to iwt and communities and these could range from high level government conferences to national dialogues held as part of our leak project and if you click on the more information button you can find more details of the events including agendas presentations given reports and other outcomes so what can you do well we're always on the lookout for new case studies and resources and if you know of any projects that may be relevant please do get in touch at people not pitching at gmail.com or if you know of any people working in this area who may be aware of projects we would love it if you could encourage them to get in touch with us and just to give you an idea of the sort of information we are looking for here's an example of a case study we received the other day and in this example the author downloaded one of our case study templates and sent in via email and you can find all these templates here they are at the bottom on our contribute page and we've got two different types the overview template is meant to provide a snapshot of initiatives and the comprehensive template does what it says in the tin and allows you to go into much more detail so as you can see here we've also got templates available in Spanish and French also and you can also upload either a case study or a resource directly onto the site so if you click one of the two buttons that you can see here it will take you to an online form and of course if you have any questions or are not sure about the best approach then please do drop me an email so finally we would really love it if you could stay in touch we have an active Twitter account and a new Facebook page where we post relevant publications every Wednesday as well as case study spotlights twice a week plus any news or updates so please do follow us we also have a new newsletter the first one went out last week and these will feature updates case studies event information and so on and if you scroll down on our homepage you'll find this pink banner where you can enter your email address to sign up so thank you so much for listening I hope you enjoyed hearing about poop not poaching and learning more about some of our case studies and now on to questions thanks very much live one of the first questions is could you just clarify the scope of the case study particularly the geographic scope of the case studies that PNP people not poaching is interested in so is it just Africa the country's in Africa or is it elsewhere no so the scope is global so we are interested in case studies from any country and case studies also that cover any species as well and at the moment we're really interested in having more case studies that are focused on plant species and we're also on the lookout for case studies from European countries because we don't currently have any and so I noticed a couple of people in the sidebar as you as you registered who hopefully may either have a case study up their sleeves or know someone so yeah on the hunt for any European ones great thank you and then could we just take you back to the snow leopard example you shared yeah clarify for the attendees who it is who's paying the local craftspeople and what exactly are local people doing in return so are they promising not to poach what is it that they promise in return for that yeah so snow leopard enterprises they are the ones that are purchasing the handicrafts from the local women or made by the local women and the conservation agreement is like you said it's an agreement to stop poaching both snow leopards and their prey and then on the case study you shared about lost and discarded fishing gears so we have a question on whether as part of that case study is there any awareness on the negative implications of the lost and discarded fishing gears alongside the compensation that's offered um so I don't know if I did mention about lost and discarded fishing gears so what these two case studies do is they provide compensation for nets that are damaged by whale sharks but I'm not sure what they the fishermen then do with them with their nets once they're damaged it's a financial mitigation approach but yeah I'm not I'm not sure what they do with the nets once they've been damaged great thanks Liv and can we move so well if we can continue to move on and listen to Amy for now just unconscious of time but we will continue to monitor the Q&A and respond to the Q&A and any questions that are not yet answered we will come to you towards the end of the discussion because there'll still be time towards the end where we can ask the question to all of our panelists Amy hi everyone wonderful to be here and talking to you all I'm gonna give you a bit of an overview of our project and some more sort of detailed analysis from one case study in a very broad and sort of general way so I work in Tanzania's Roaha landscape on human carnivore conflict and so to give you a perspective for those of you who don't know where Roaha is it's a really important landscape for all large carnivores but particularly for lions and for African wild dogs so if you look at lion range in particular it's hugely important because lions used to range extensively across sub-Saharan Africa this is our latest analysis of lion range and lion numbers have nearly halved in the last 20 years so there are very few big populations left the biggest ones are shown in dark blue here and conflict is one of the major reasons for this decline in lions and potentially illegal wildlife trade for lion bone is also a growing threat Tanzania is the most important country for lions has about 40% of the world's lions and Roaha down here has about 8% of the world's lions so really significant but across Africa both in Roaha and elsewhere much of the lion range is on the same land extremely poor pastoralists and subsistence farmers and that leads to impacts on both sides so it's very common to have situations like this where one of somebody's few cattle were killed by lions and then people retaliate unsurprisingly or proactively by killing lions and other carnivores so the amount of killing that we saw on village land around Roaha was the highest documented rate of lion mortality anywhere in east Africa so huge amounts of killing and when we talked to people they said particularly it was this barabay tribe that were involved but you really needed to engage with the barabay and with other tribes on village land to understand why this level of killing was happening we tried for two years to understand the amount of killing and try to engage with these people but found it almost impossible we lived on village land amongst people but they would run away from us they were very hostile towards conservationists until we put up solar panels to charge our laptops and then the barabay turned up to charge their cell phones and it still kills me that I didn't think of this earlier because it's so obvious that the way to engage people is offering them what they want through conservation rather than trying to approach them with your agenda so when we finally built this relationship and started discussing things with the communities there were four key drivers of conflict and killings the first and the most obvious was high costs of wildlife presence particularly attacks on livestock and then very importantly there were few or no benefits to offset those costs and the benefits that did occur didn't happen where the costs were being from in crude a crude also for warriors cultural rewards for killing lions if the warrior went and killed a lion they got wealth because they were given cattle they got status in the community and they got sex because women would dance for them and there was very little conservation awareness and engagement so we've worked on all four areas of these drives of conflict the first one the most urgent for people was to try to reduce the tax and this was done just by reinforcing livestock enclosures about two-thirds of attacks were happening in poorly constructed livestock enclosures and this is a simple cost-sharing basis where the householder committed 25% of the cost they also committed to upkeep of the maintenance of the boners and we found that really effective these have reduced attacks by over 95% they also reduce attacks on neighbors boners even those people who haven't actually reinforced their own we're not quite sure why this seems to be important however it doesn't work well for mobile pastoralists so for those who have now developed these mobile canvas corals or boners that can be rolled up and moved from site to site these are placed on crop fields and this has a really important impact of actually improving crop yields within these sites because of the the dung being trodden into them by the cattle so this actually has real impact on food security as well as protecting livestock but obviously you don't just want to protect them at night you have to protect them the day so we brought in amatolian shepherd guarding dogs the first time these had been used in east Africa they look ridiculously small when you give them to a farmer but actually they grow into intimidating dogs a little bit too big we're now looking at breeding them with village dogs to see if we can stem the growth in the first year a little bit because that can be too much of a challenge for local people to maintain the diet these dogs need but they're very effective and we found they will chase lions away from livestock as well but it's never enough just to reduce costs as I'm holly and others have pointed out it's all about providing benefits as well we worked extensively for several years with the communities to understand the benefits they would like and they have three key priorities education for the children health care particularly of women and newborn children and veterinary services we've worked extensively with local authorities to develop programs on each of these and we found these were really important at helping to show the communities that we were there with them long term and that we were actually considering what they needed rather than just us sort of our goal of reducing lion killing we've also started a school feeding program because that was identified as a major issue by the women in particular we found all of these were really important in engaging people but we found unsurprisingly that people were taking the benefits but then still going out and killing carnivores because why wouldn't it's really important you actually tie the presence of benefits to the presence of wildlife on village land another thing we had to do was to engage local warriors in conservation so we worked with lion guardians in Kenya we've developed a culturally appropriate warrior engagement scheme this is identifying ways from the warriors themselves that they could get status they could get attention from women they could get wealth through conservation rather than lion killing and the we employ them as lion trackers lion conservationists they explained to us what it meant to be a warrior it means to be brave and it means to be respected in your community so because we employ them to track lions to keep people safe from lions they get that status and they get wealth every month in order to get them other status and you know to replace the bravery they showed from killing a lion that seemed very hard to us when we asked them what they thought would best replace it they said it was learning how to read or write because very few people could do it and then in terms of getting attention from women which is key to them they wanted to be able to dance so we have conservation dancers once a month in villages where there hasn't been a lion kill and there's lots and lots of women come to these and they see these young men who are really becoming sort of leaders in their communities and this has become a very effective way of changing these these lion killers into conservationists we also need to raise local awareness and engagement so we take people into the parks they can learn about wildlife firsthand and also do DVD nights these were great for getting people engaged with our work but actually as I said one of the things that was lacking was how do we show that these benefits don't come from the project but they come from the presence of the wildlife itself so you don't have people just getting the benefits and still going out and killing your wildlife at the time we were doing camera trapping for research and we were finding the camera tracks were being stolen so we brought these two problems together and we trained the local communities to go out and do the camera trapping themselves and we've come up with a very simple system with them where they get a certain number of points for every wild animal that they catch on their village camera track so something small like a dip-dick will get you a thousand points you get more points for a species if it's more endangered and creates more conflict so primates will get you 1500 points it's per individual animal so this impaler and the baboon will get them two and a half thousand points they give more points for carnivores so a hyena will get you 10 000 points they will also eat your camera trap a lion will get 15 000 points and the top spot is the african wild dog with 20 000 points it's per individual animal so this group of 17 wild dogs gave the village concern 340 000 points and what happens is that the villagers compete against each other in groups of four villages at the end of every three months we have five thousand dollars worth of benefits to distribute to the priority needs of those villagers and so the first village gets two thousand dollars the next 1500 the next a thousand and the next 500 so each village benefits we also have employment provided through the program because they employ sorry we paved the employment of community camera trap officers we also show them every month the pictures that are caught in their village and this has been transformation and engaging people in understanding wildlife on their land and really recognizing that it's the presence of that wildlife that generates the extra benefits so this goes into extra healthcare extra education and extra military support and it means that people see a real reason for tolerating wildlife on village land and there is less support for those people who go out and poach it or engage in a legal wildlife trade we really it is key to put people at the heart of conservation so we've done a book about the work in the local languages and made the Barabaga tribe the center of this because they felt the conservation was not for them so this has been really important and making sure that it's their story and their engagement in conservation impact so far in the core area we have had the depredation of tax on livestock reduced by over 60 percent and most importantly for us as conservationists the carnival killing has been reduced by over 80 percent we've particularly seen the women and the young warriors standing up and going out there and stopping hunts happening those warriors that we've employed as lion defenders have now stopped over 120 lion hunts happening and it's really important that wildlife is now the major driver of local development so this is recognized people are starting to protect the camera traps protect key sites for wildlife because they see that it really is generating important benefits for them key lessons learned and just thoughts for us all is that conflict is obviously multi-layered so when you first talk to people about it it's about deprivation but it actually runs much deeper you have to consider many diverse factors people's culture their religious affiliations their history with conservation etc we found there was a lot of possibility towards conservationists because of past experience the conflict resolution approaches have to be driven by the needs of the local community not imposed externally and it's really important to provide benefits to the directly linked to the presence of wildlife not the presence of an organization and people say that you can't change culture we often find people just say well that's impossible to address it can and it does change quickly if it's in people's interest to do so there are many ethical and moral issues how much cost should local communities bear for what is an international good and how do we make that fair it's something that I don't have the answer to yet and there are real concerns these approaches often rely on the poverty of affected communities if it's all about economics we could see conservation strategies being outcompeted by something say mining anything else so it's got to be about building it into people's culture as well issues of sustainability are often brought up to the community camera trapping costs about $80,000 per year for 16 villages and the project overall costs about $400,000 I personally think this is a responsibility that needs to be met internationally by donors partners businesses philanthropists because local people are already bearing so much of the opportunity and direct costs of wildlife and there is ultimately no silver bullet that each site needs a thorough understanding of the local situation so that we can develop appropriate solutions which you always need to assess and adapt yourself and if you want to find out anymore we've got a website or our carnivalproject.com or you can email me as well thank you Thanks very much Amy so some of the first questions around the dogs particularly the guarding dogs and particular questions about are the local communities particularly pressured with the cost of maintaining the guarding dogs and is there any knowledge of the effects of the shepherd dogs on other wildlife other than a lion so for example direct predation or landscape fear effects yeah so to answer that briefly there was no we paid the cost for the first year of the puppy because that first year is very stressful because and also because if people skimp in that year you end up with leg issues and bone issues for the dogs it's important they get enough nutrition through that first year after that the households take it over and we have seen people then being very willing to invest in that but again there are ethics about how do we even support the first year of a dog's life when you've got families that are very food insecure we found that people are willing to invest because they really value their livestock we've seen the dogs being very protective we haven't seen impacts in terms of hunting or poaching with the dogs because of the breed of dog we use they're not good hunters at all they are specifically a guarding dog and if they want to go out and poach they will use their own dogs for that. So what type of benefits are people getting for those points Amy you mentioned the different levels of points and what does the money pay for? So at the moment they will get the each village has identified their priority areas so there are three key themes of education healthcare veterinary medicine so every three months say the top village will get two thousand dollars and they will work out how to split that between their health care committee their education committee and their veterinary medicine committee so that's they decide that and that's something that we have a huge amount of transparency locally they post up what they want to do with it they post up the receipts from how they've spent the money and then all of the discussions at the community level for governance and transparency happen between the villagers and the village leaders because all of that the requirements of the programs it's all posted up publicly so they through their own committees decide what they want to spend it on. Great thank you and then there's quite a few questions on what your source of funding is for the benefit provision and where's the money coming from for the point system camera trapping and how long will this this program have worked last for how can you ensure its sustainability? Sustainability question always comes up we have a diverse range of funders who fund that national geographic peoples trust for endangered species SOSIUCN so various people we found it very easy thing to get funding for it's a very sexy program to fund because you can get a lot of benefits you get the ecological monitoring you get community engagement and training and employment and then obviously it leads to the actual community benefits and development so it's something that I'm happy to share with anyone who's interested we found it very very useful and probably the biggest thing for changing attitudes in terms of how long it will last it's gone on so far for three years we are hoping to consider it to continue it long term and we are now starting to adapt it in a couple of the villages where we'll start to have a conservation payments and a conservation contract that will be tied up in that but we're just trying different approaches in different models but then that one's been very very successful and popular locally. From related to that Amy what alternatives do you have in place of funding decreases so if we're thinking about the current COVID crisis and the impact on the economy what kind of challenges does that present through a program like yours? Yeah absolutely yes it definitely presents issues because we are entirely donor driven and we have a year's worth of operational reserves that's what we try to build up on but that is just for the core cost of it so we would absolutely be forced to scale things back if we lose funding and then I think that's on me to try to look at which other diverse sources of funding have we not approached yet in UK aid lots of these kinds of things to try to get a broad network of funders but the issue is that if donor driven projects you know freeze in terms of the funders then of course you can't do as much locally and we would then prioritise the really core needs that the communities have just to show that we are there long term in some sense at least until things pick up again. And then Amy there's a question here about communities and whether communities feel like they might be in competition with one another for the benefits have you seen any evidence between villages of any tensions or competition issues? We definitely have we found villages of course set up as a competition and that's both the strength and the weakness so we found one of the issues was that people tended to put the camera traps by streams which tended to be borders between villages and then people were saying well that's unfair they're pointing into our village land and that impala is ours so why are they getting the points for it so now we've said to them you can't put the camera traps within a kilometre of your village boundary to try to reduce that but if so there is an ongoing competition but the points get reset after three months so if one village is doing well and another is doing badly we will work with the one that's doing badly relatively and say to them you know what about moving your camera trap or they themselves will often say how can we do something that's better could we set aside an area of our land for wildlife so they are coming up with solutions to try to improve wildlife detection on their land as well. There's a few more questions and we're running a little bit out of time because we need to go on to a discussion with all of the panelists but there's an interesting question here about ethical difficulties and whether you find that there are any ethical difficulties that arise because one of the aims of the project is to actively change local cultures that are strongly sensitive on human wildlife interaction. There are many ethical issues and it's one of the things that really keeps me up at night in terms of just in this broad area you know what are we asking people to live alongside what sort of costs should people have with them because we internationally want these species to survive there are loads of ethical issues all the way through as I alluded to briefly in terms of the ethics of changing cultural particularly a culture that's been very predicated on lion killing that isn't so much of an issue because this kind of traditional killing is actually not legal locally anyway and there's lots of pressure on them to change so it's a very good time for them to change to something where they get the benefits through conservation not killing and that's something and none of the work is we don't have any kind of enforcement of it it's very much those people want to join in if they want to do it they can so it's not imposed upon people in any way and we've seen huge community engagement and people wanting to ensure that this goes on long term. Great thank you so if I can invite all the panelists to unmute and we'll we'll spend the last 15 minutes asking questions to all of you try and pick out some of the questions that are relevant to all of you your presentations and and so if you could take it in turns to talk possible so one of the first questions is around you know there's been some really impressive initiatives that have been shared by all three of you but just going back to this sustainability issue and thinking about the need for investment of resources can you comment at all on the longer term effects of these efforts what is the evidence for continued community and wildlife benefits after the project ends and the project workers leave the community areas is there true systemic change in how communities view wildlife or conservation beyond the presence of the project itself? Amy did you want to start and then? Oh sorry sorry yep yeah I'm happy to start on that I mean I have a fairly depressing view on that in that it takes a long time to change these views systemically and these actions so I think you need at least a generation and our project for instance has gone on for 10 years but I think if if we pulled out tomorrow some of this would leave some long-term benefits because you know the scholarships we do all kinds of the impoundments happened but people would quickly revert towards killing wildlife if there wasn't the benefits to offset the costs and I think it is on us internationally as community members of a wider community to ensure there is sustainability of funding because without it I don't see genuine change happening because that discrepancy between the costs and the benefits and who those accrue to is so great. It's Dillis here just to add to to Amy's point about that I think you know with this current situation of COVID-19 and the impact that that is having on global tourism and the funding streams that come from that that support communities and pay for them to tolerate wildlife on their land I think has huge implications for thinking about financial sustainability of a lot of our conservation models and I think really emphasizes the need for a more long-term mechanism for financial flows from the north to the south whether it's some kind of PES system or biodiversity credits or whatever it is that goes beyond a reliance on externally funded projects or income streams from just from tourism or just from hunting or those kinds of revenue streams that are so affected by external conditions. Holly is there anything you would like to add? Yeah thanks Francesca Holly here. I think the only thing I would add to that I very much agree with what Amy and Dillis have just said. I think one of the places there's of course in our community of practice there's a lot of exchange going on right now and as Dillis says COVID-19 is a great test case but probably a very very extreme test case. One of the things that's coming out of the discussions is that the more localized the partnerships are the more secure so you know those that are those that tend to be funded by either you know donors from other governments or from you know working through non-governmental organizations because those organizations themselves are so dependent on that money when that money dries up they're you know they have less ability. In some cases you just have people who are living their lives and whether they're farmers themselves or whether they have small-scale tourism operations the fluctuations the bigger fluctuations the globalized fluctuations may have much less impact because some industries continue because people stay in jobs and they continue to to link to those communities more closely so I think that's another reason why we also always have to make sure that there are local linkages for local communities of those who you know who live and share the ups and downs of any community life just as we're seeing right now for communities around the world with COVID-19 I think that people are going to become a lot more localized that is that is a known effect of what's going on and in some of these cases where we've worked you have people that have been working for generations and generations with one another going through droughts going through extreme weather events going through disease tending to bounce back so I think that that's also a very important anchor is what exactly comprises a community a community is always comprised of more than you know just a small ethnic group there might be the traders that bring food there might be you know people that work on the roads there could be any number of things and it's important that people have community around them. Great thank you one of the next questions and it's raised by a few people is it is this issue of corruption and so you've all spoken about sharing and for benefits but there are issues of corruption and elite capture which really present quite tricky issues for conservation organizations so if you've got any advice on how you can how conservation organizations can tackle this within some of the work that they're doing can we take the same order maybe Amy and then Delis and Holly. Yep sure so in terms of corruption it's obviously a major issue when we looked at lion conservation across all the range countries the biggest issue was governance and poor governance I think the biggest way to deal with that is to take it to as low a level as possible so with the example of our benefits which we're now going to move into cash benefits and that'll be an interesting change with probably more scope for corruption is one where people have to know how much money is been handed over it's very public what it's been spent on you see the receipts you make as transparent as possible it's a lot of work and I think for that to be effective it has to be done at the most locally devolved way possible because that's where you've got the accountability from you know from somebody say in the village to the village leader rather than it being a remote district or national level gap that they just can't bridge. Yeah Delis here yeah I agree with Amy's focus on the local and I think it's really important to remember that corruption can seem overwhelming and that you know we know that it can be rife from national governments right down to elite capture by particular people in a local community and I think the real challenge is not to be overwhelmed by it but to tackle those aspects of corruption that we can tackle so probably focusing most on the local level is what conservation organizations can do most effectively so not to say we just give up because we can't tackle we can't solve corruption at the national government level I think if Holly will talk more about this but the theory of change that we use for the first line of defense initiative has tackling government or getting the the right governance conditions in place as one of the key enabling factors that needs to be addressed so we recognize that it's absolutely fundamental and in many ways having open conversations with local communities and going through the process that we go through with the first line of defense methodology is at very least a way of getting some of these issues out into the open and discussed and people being aware of who's getting what benefits and and understanding that some things are going on that they weren't previously aware of is actually a really powerful tool to contribute to addressing corruption particularly at the local level by making it more obvious and more transparent one of the good case studies it's on the people not poaching website is the revumer elephant project in Tanzania and there they talk a lot about the fact that they work with multiple different actors at all different levels so from the local level up to the national level and because lots of different actors are in place and trying to work together they see that as a really critical way of reducing corruption because again it's kind of enforcing a level of transparency and scrutiny by others so encouraging that partnership working across levels can also be an effective way of starting to tackle corruption at some at some level but clearly not resolving the whole issue only a quick quick addition please i mean just to go back to to what i was talking about earlier when this very similar question was asked so you know we could be talking about different things i mean corruption when it comes to benefits accruing at the most local level i would say that the comments made by by Amy and dillis are are pretty much what i would agree the greater transparency that occurs at the local level the more you can get on top of that um you'd probably all of you'd be very surprised to know that when we start to interrogate the assumptions um through the flood methodology we ask very explicit things like who is involved in these various things and they they generally give you song and verse whether it's you know local government whether it's the local wildlife rangers whether it's their own people in fact because we work in focal groups many times the women will actually tell us about men in the in the community so you can find out a lot in there and they can also help to say what they think would be solutions and many times they do have very clear ideas in terms of social norms or state-led law enforcement but i think we have to separate this very clearly from corruption that comes in when you're dealing with the high high benefits of illegal wildlife trade this is a different level of corruption all together than playing around with you know how we distributed some rather small benefits within the community when we're start talking about people that are making vast amounts of money at every single level within the value chain now of course you're going to have to be taking other other kinds of actions to deal with corruption but i think that the further you get from that local community um the further really that most non-governmentals can really operate in that field and that becomes the field of those you know dealing with drugs and and other forms of crime and there are very very active networks that work on corruption at those levels so i think it's very important when we talk about corruption you know are we talking about elite capture at the most local level or are we talking about um you know vast sums of money being made by putting people to work where they get paid very little to do the the poaching and someone else it goes up exponentially in terms of the benefits as you step down the supply chain so i think that um you know as dillis said governance governance governance and uh at the local community level there's a lot to be dealt with but i think i just end by linking sustainability and governance and say that you know local communities being able to put in place their own forms of governance and strengthen those and helping to strengthen those rather than ever having that be dependent on any form of project would be the way that i would go and we know that there are many cases where local communities have incredibly strong systems of self-governance and it's the places where those systems have been badly damaged that other things are able to come in so wherever we can continue to bolster those and help them in any way i think that's probably our best starting point thanks holly so time is taking on so we don't have much time for a few many more questions but one of the interesting questions that's come up from one of the attendees is what would speakers recommend for those organizations embarking on work with communities to prevent illegal wildlife trade where they're new or they don't have experience i ask you to be relatively short in your answers any dillis and holly just a quick highlight what was the top advice that you would give yeah so for me i think literally just spending the time listening to people try to abandon your preconceived ideas about why they're doing it really listen to it and yeah and the answers will come from them yeah i would have the same answer the first line of defence approach is specifically intended for that it's to help people understand where the community is coming from and what their perspectives are rather than going along with your own perspective so i think using tools that help you understand the community and designing your illegal wildlife trade or human wildlife conflict initiative from the community outwards rather than trying to impose your own ideas yep i would just i would just add to that of course just go to that website and you'll find a lot of stuff on the flood website but also to say that in the new training modules we're going to be having a part of that which talks about the establishment of new projects and i think you're going to find some guidance in there so all of it for us starts at the local level and helping to build community voice great and just just for all attendees benefit we will be sharing the tools that holly has mentioned and we'll be sharing all the presentations with you as well as a recording of the webinar so and we will make those available widely available and we are running 10 minutes beyond what we were supposed to be doing we were supposed to stop this webinar at half past three so i should really bring it to a close by thanking all the panelists for their presentations very interesting thank you very much and thanks to the attendees for all of your questions and i apologize that we didn't manage to get to all of them time didn't permit we will be in touch with a recording of the webinar and we'll also share all the presentations and the tools that holly has mentioned the tools and resources that holly has referred to but if you do have any questions these don't hesitate to get in contact with us at IIED and you can find my contact very easily on the IID website my name's Francesca Booker so please do just drop me a line if you have any further questions but thank you very much for participating and i hope you stay safe and and take care of your families thank you for joining thanks