On 25-26 April 2017, members of the Task Force met in Oxford, UK, for a two-day meeting. The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss and develop some of the outputs of the Task Force.
One of the main roles of the group is to provide interdisciplinary guidance to support the IUCN SSC network and other practitioners in addressing human-wildlife conflict. During our first meeting, back in2016, we discussed three key questions with the aim of helping to structure what the task force should achieve. These were:
1. What does the world need to tackle human-wildlife conflict?
2. What meaningful and substantial contribution will the task force make?
3. How will we go about doing this?
The Task Force members felt there were three keys topics that needed to be addressed. Firstly, understanding what a given conflict is about and the complexities of conflict. Secondly, knowing what is needed for mitigation of a given conflict including having a better understanding of the principles and processes of conflict mitigation and management. Finally, having the skills, capacity, and resources to act in the right way, ensuring that conflict is being dealt with in an effective way.
One of the ways the Task Force will contribute to address these needs is through the production of short guidance documents on several different key topics of human-wildlife conflict.
During our meeting members discussed topics to cover. These included: engaging with stakeholders, assessing and measuring the impact of a conflict, different roles in conflict and conflict analysis. The Task Force will be publishing these documents over the course of the next IUCN quadrennium (2017-2020) to assist practitioners in reducing human-wildlife conflict.
