Human–Wildlife Conflict and Gender in Protected Area Borderlands: A Case Study of Costs, Perceptions, and Vulnerabilities from Uttarakhand (Uttaranchal), India

Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) is a growing problem for communities located at the borders of protected areas. Such conflicts commonly take place as crop-raiding events and as attack by wild animals, among other forms. This paper uses a feminist political ecology approach to examine these two problems in an agricultural village located at the border of Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand (formerly Uttaranchal), India. Specifically, it investigates the following three questions: What are the “visible” and “hidden” costs of such conflict with wildlife? To what extent are these costs differentially borne by men and women? How do villagers perceive any such differences? Survey and interview data were collected from over 100 individuals in the study site over a period of 9 months in 2003–2004. It was found that for participants in this study, costs of HWC included decreased food security, changes to workload, decreased physical and psychological wellbeing, economic hardship, and at times an increase in illegal or dangerous activities. The research also showed that although women in the study area bore a disproportionate burden of these effects, roughly half of survey respondents perceived that men and women were equally affected. A possible explanation for this gap considers the relationships between gendered uses of space, work, status, and identity. The findings illustrate the importance of addressing both visible and hidden costs of HWC for members of park communities and support a call for increased gender-sensitivity in HWC research

Gender and Climate Change in the Indian Himalayas: Global Threats, Local Vulnerabilities, and Livelihood Diversification at the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve

Global climate change has numerous implications for members of mountain communities who feel the impacts in both physical and social dimensions. In the western Himalayas of India, a majority of residents maintain a livelihood strategy that includes a combination of subsistence or small-scale agriculture, livestock rearing, seasonal or long-term migration, and localized natural resource extraction. While warming temperatures, irregular patterns of precipitation and snowmelt, and changing biological systems present challenges to the viability of these traditional livelihood portfolios in general, we find that climate change is also undermining local communities’ livelihood assets in gender-specific ways. In this paper, we present a case study from the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (Uttarakhand, India) that both outlines the implications of climate change for women farmers in the area and highlights the potential for ecotourism (as a form of livelihood diversification) to strengthen both key livelihood assets of women and local communities’ adaptive capacity more broadly. The paper intentionally employs a categorical focus on women but also addresses issues of inter-group and gender diversity. With this special issue in mind, suggestions for related research are proposed for consideration by climate scientists and social systems and/or policy modelers seeking to support gender justice through socially transformative perspectives and frameworks

Ecodevelopment, Gender, and Empowerment: Perspectives from India’s Protected Area Communities

Book abstract: Feminism has re-shaped the way we think about equality, power relations and social change. Recent feminist scholarship has provided new theoretical frameworks, methodologies and empirical analyses of how gender and feminism are situated within the development process.Global Perspectives on Gender and Space: Engaging Feminism and Development draws upon this framework to explore the effects of globalization on development in diverse geographical contexts. It explores how women’s and men’s lives are gendered in specific spaces as well as across multiple landscapes

Carbon, Cookstoves, and Kitchens: Case Studies of Fuelwood Use and the Potential for Ethanol Substitutability in Rural India, Vietnam, and Tanzania

Fuelwood constitutes the primary domestic cooking fuel in many rural communities throughout the Global South. Unsustainable levels of fuelwood consumption, however, contribute not only to local forest degradation but also to global climate change through the release of black carbon and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Moreover, as a driver of indoor air pollution, it also negatively affects human health. Indoor air pollution linked to cooking smoke is among the leading causes of preventable respiratory disease, and negatively impacts women and children through disproportionate and repeated exposure. While many cleaner and more efficient alternate stove designs have been developed for use in fuelwood-dependent communities, culturally-based user incompatibilities and technical design problems can lead to lack of widespread adoption. Although fuelwood dependence has also been offset by the availability of subsidized commercially-available fuels such as kerosene or liquid petroleum gas (LPG), the need persists for a clean, efficient, locally available, and sustainable fuel source for use in household cooking. This poster presents the results of three related, pilot project case studies about the potential for alcohol-fueled stoves to serve as a pathway to fuelwood substitution. The poster explores questions of cultural feasibility and the related roles of gender/class/ethnicity dynamics within a community, cooking and fuel preferences of stove users, and religious considerations related to non-consumptive alcohol use. Our study raises important issues for advocates of alternative technologies to consider, including the potential for resource capture by elites, openings for promotion of gender equity, and opportunities for socially and environmentally sustainable development

Climate Change Perceptions, Data, and Adaptation in the Garhwal Himalayas of India

Himalayan communities that depend on rain-fed agriculture are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change. In this study, we compare local perceptions of climate change from a household survey (n = 251) to climate data obtained from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS 2.1) and MODIS Terra Snow Cover data product datasets. The study is situated in and around the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, which is located within the Garhwal Himalayas in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. We found that a large majority of respondents perceive that rainfall is increasing and that snowfall is decreasing, while a smaller majority perceives an increase in summer temperatures and no change in winter temperatures. Agreeing with the perceptions of the majority, the climate data show an increase in summer temperature and winter rainfall. However, the climate data also show an increase in winter temperature, and no monotonic change in snowfall, findings which are contrary to the perception of the majority. Household perceptions of climate change were not associated with adaptation; while many households perceived change, very few reported that they were planning to adapt. To encourage adaptation, communities would benefit from locally appropriate climate data products, and collaboration on best practices with researchers, NGOs, and extension services

Gender and Community-Oriented Wildlife Conservations: Views from Project Supervisors in India

This is the result of RPD-funded research about the ways in which conservation professionals in India conceptualize (and sometimes act upon) their notions of “gender” in the context of community-based wildlife conservation

Gender Mainstreaming in Community-Oriented Wildlife Conservation: Experiences from Nongovernmental Conservation Organizations in India

Gender mainstreaming (GM) is the promotion of gender equity and women’s empowerment in institutional policy and practice. GM can potentially improve community oriented conservation outcomes because gender roles often shape values, knowledge, use, and access=control of environmental resources. Through a mixed-methods study of 52 nongovernmental organizations (NGO)-based, community-oriented wildlife conservation projects in India, this article examines supervisors’ perceptions of the effectiveness of GM in achieving conservation outcomes. While many projects did include elements of GM (specifically, gender analysis and support for women’s empowerment), approaches tended to be ad hoc and not empirically grounded. To overcome obstacles to integration of GM in conservation, NGOs would benefit from the creation of formal gender policies to guide baseline data collection and analysis, professional development, and related empirical research. Ultimately, the study illustrates various ways in which gender and conservation issues intersect, and helps to demonstrate when a GM approach can promote the success of specific conservation projects

Tracking the Human–Wildlife–Conservation Nexus Across the Human–Animal Studies (HAS) Landscape

Special Issue Introductio

Conservation-Induced Resettlement as a Driver of Land Cover Change in India: An Object-Based Trend Analysis

Located in the foothills of the Indian Himalaya, Rajaji National Park was established to protect and enhance the habitat of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and tiger (Panthera tigris). In 2002 the Van Gujjars, indigenous forest pastoralists, were voluntarily resettled from the Chilla Range (an administrative unit of Rajaji National Park) to Gaindikhata, a nearby area where they were granted land for agriculture. In this study we used a variety of remote sensing approaches to identify changes in land cover associated with the resettlement. The methods comprise two main approaches. First, we used object-based image analysis (OBIA) to identify the pre-resettlement land cover classes of use areas (representing agricultural expansion and adjacent areas of grazing, and collection of fuelwood and fodder) and recovery areas (representing areas where settlements were removed, and the adjacent areas of resource use). Secondly, we used trend analysis to assess the gradual and abrupt changes in vegetation that took place in use and recovery areas. To conduct the trend analysis we used BFAST (Breaks For Additive Season and Trend), which separates seasonal variation from long-term trends, and identifies breaks that can be linked back to disturbances or land cover changes. We found that the OBIA classification yielded high average class accuracies, and we were able to make class distinctions that would have been difficult to make using a traditional pixel-based approach. Pre-resettlement, the recovery areas were classified as mixed forest and riparian vegetation. In contrast, the use areas were classified primarily as grass dominated, brush dominated, and plantation forest, and were located relatively far away from riparian areas. Following the resettlement, the trend analysis showed a sudden change in the seasonal variation of NDVI in areas converted to agriculture. Areas neighboring the new agricultural land experienced sudden decreases in NDVI, suggestive of disturbances, at a higher rate than the same land cover types elsewhere. At the same time, these neighboring areas experienced a gradual overall increase in NDVI which could be caused by an expansion of leafy invasive shrubs such as Lantana camara in areas heavily used for biomass collection. The recovery areas also experienced a gradual increase in NDVI as well as sudden breaks to this trend, but we lacked evidence to connect these changes to the resettlement. Our findings support the claim that the resettlement has shifted pressure from more ecologically valuable to less ecologically valuable land cover types, and suggest that to some degree resource use pressure has increased outside the park. The study employs a novel synthesis of OBIA and trend analysis that could be applied to land change studies more broadly

Local Perceptions of Change in Climate and Agroecosystems in the Indian Himalayas: A Case Study of the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (KWS) Landscape, India

Agricultural communities in the Himalayas are especially vulnerable to the shocks of climate change. An improved understanding of how residents perceive changes to climate and agroecosystems is critical to creating and implementing locally appropriate adaptation strategies. In this study, we administered a questionnaire to 251 residents within 16 villages in and adjacent to the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (KWS), a culturally and ecologically important area in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The study area is rugged and remote, and the resource-dependent communities are among the least-studied of the region. Using the questionnaire, we investigated how residents perceive changes to climate and agroecosystems, how households are adapting, and whether perceptions and adaptations differ by demographic and livelihood factors. We used both quantitative (summary statistics, t-tests, and chi square tests) and qualitative strategies (interpretation of open-ended responses) to analyze the questionnaire results. A majority of respondents perceived an increase in many variables including flash flood/landslide events, total annual rainfall, average summer temperature, agricultural pests, crop failure, and crop raiding by wild animals. In most cases, perceptions did not vary by demographic or livelihood factors. However, larger landholders were more likely to perceive an increase in intense rain/snow, average annual rainfall, and wildlife sightings in fields. Most respondents reported that they were not adapting or planning to adapt to change. However, a few reported adaptation strategies such as changing crops and planting vegetation to stabilize soil, as well as pesticide use. Respondents believed that to effectively adapt they need assistance from outside institutions. Locally-based (panchayat) and state-level institutions were ranked as very helpful for adaptation, but the Forest Department, Government of India, and NGOs received lower rankings. Overall, the respondents demonstrated a high level of agreement in their perceptions of change and barriers to adaptation. The broad consensus among residents offers an important opportunity for consensus building and collaboration with local and national institutions. The study has implications for collaborative public works and research projects which can help to build trust, develop locally-appropriate adaptation strategies, reduce conflict with wild animals, share insights, and increase the visibility of local knowledge about climate and agroecosystems. Furthermore, the study illustrates how understanding the perceptions and insights of agricultural communities around protected areas can inform adaptation at the ground level