(Posted 03rd February 2025)
Courtesy of African Elephant News and Alberto Leny, People Daily
Increased commercial hunting and associated depletion of large-bodied wildlife in African tropical forests, is a source of critical environmental concerns, a ground-breaking new study on wildlife hunting has revealed.
The study was published on January 7 in Nature Sustainability by lead authors Daniel Ingram (Durrell Institute of Conservation of Ecology, University of Kent), Katharine Abernethy (University of Stirling), John Scharlemann (formerly University of Sussex), and Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) scientist Lauren Coad.
The study’s findings seek urgent action to reverse the concerning trends, according to Coad, co-author and scientist at the Nairobi-based CIFOR-ICRAF.
“Sustainable wildlife management solutions, coupled with continued long-term monitoring, are urgently needed to preserve Central Africa’s wildlife resources,” said Coad of the report whose findings were enabled by advances in data availability and accessibility.
Several organisations collaborated in the CIFOR-ICRAF-supported study, including the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Institut de Recherche en Ecologie Tropicale (IRET).
It is the first study to explore the factors that influence wild animal hunting patterns across African tropical forests in detail, and on a regional scale.
Other than hunting, wildlife trade and tracking is a major environmental and animal health concern, increasingly so in the climate change era.
With an estimated US$7-23 billion per year, wildlife tracking is the world’s fourth most profitable clandestine market after tracking in counterfeit goods, drugs and people, according to the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
The hunting and consumption of wild animals is one of the principal ways by which many zoonotic agents are transmitted to humans. The uncontrolled hunting and consumption of wild animals poses great risks to hunters and consumers alike.
The development of new urban areas and infrastructure for activities such as mining facilitates smugglers and hunters’ access to wildlife.
Deadlier Encounters
Many wild animals are sold for their meat, skin, teeth (elephant tusks as ivory), rhino horns or nails, or as pets and are raised in extremely adverse and stressful conditions. They come into contact with each other and humans in uncontrolled environments, making the emergence of infectious diseases inevitable.
The research made extensive use of wildmeat.org, the largest compilation of African hunting data to date, to explore the socio-cultural, economic and landscape variables associated with wild animal hunting across 115 settlements in African tropical forests.
