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Community Camera Trapping +
Community benefits linked to the presence of wildlife
One of the main threats to conservation is that local people receive little or no tangible, relevant benefits from wildlife presence, in order to outweigh the costs that such wildlife can impose. Conservation projects do often provide community benefits, such as scholarships etc, but these are usually associated with the presence of the project rather than the wildlife itself. Therefore, even if people receive the benefits, they are not likely to want to maintain the wildlife, especially those species which cause conflict.
To address this, we worked closely with local communities to develop our ‘Community Camera-Trapping’ programme. Local people monitor wildlife on their land using camera-traps, and receive points for each wild animal photographed. More points are given for more threatened species, and for those which are likely to cause most conflict. Every three months, these points are translated into additional benefits for the community, focused on their identified priority areas, such as healthcare and education. Because these benefits demonstrably, directly and transparently come from the presence of wildlife, this programme provides a clear incentive for local people to maintain wildlife on their land.
This programme has been very successful in helping community development and improving tolerance for wildlife on village land. It is now being adapted and scaled up internationally, and has been covered by international organisations and shortlisted for an award for conservation innovation.
Incentivising conservation actions
Our Community Camera Trapping (CCT) has been successful at improving tolerance for wildlife on community land, but wider threats still exist, such as people putting down poison or snares, or killing wildlife rather than using non-lethal ways to reduce conflict. To address these wider threats, we have worked with communities to expand the CCT programme into wider conservation agreements, known as Community Camera Trapping Plus (CCT+).
The new CCT+ model addresses behavioural change by introducing bonuses for specific conservation-positive activities and penalties for conservation-negative activities. This means that, besides earning benefits from the presence of wildlife, extra benefits can be earned if people take actions to help conservation (such as fortifying livestock enclosures) while penalties exist if people take actions that harm conservation (e.g. poisoning wildlife and snaring). The specifics of the positive and negative conservation activities, the types of benefits, and how they will be shared are carefully co-developed with each village or village cluster and written into a conservation agreement.
This collaborative approach incentivises the communities to identify conservation threats which can be tackled locally, and gives them a real reason to work together to reduce those threats. Overall, this programme provides tangible, additional support for communities, while also incentivising effective, appropriate conservation actions at a local level.
Case-study Community Camera Trapping programme
This case-study is developed by the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.
