Large carnivore damage in Europe: Analysis of compensation and prevention programs

By C. Bautista, E. Revilla, J. Naves, Jörg Albrecht, Néstor Fernández, A. Olszańska, M. Adamec, T. Berezowska-Cnota, P. Ciucci, C. Groff and 12 more. Biological Conservation, 2019

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The mitigation of conflicts associated with large carnivore damage to livestock and agriculture is pivotal to their conservation. We evaluate current programs to compensate and prevent large carnivore damage in 27 European countries and the factors related to the economic costs of these programs. Overall, high compensation costs are associated with free-ranging livestock (68% of total costs) and with national economic wealth. Contrary to general belief, the return of large carnivores does not always translate into higher compensation costs. We identify a tendency towards prioritizing compensation over prevention; only a few wealthy countries pay the majority of the money allocated for prevention programs to adapt husbandry practices to the presence of large carnivores. We conclude that programs mainly focused on paying large compensation amounts will often fail to build tolerance towards predators. To mitigate conflicts and optimize the cost-effectiveness of publicly funded measures, responsible agencies should be proactive, focus on prevention-based policies and periodically evaluate the effectiveness of compensation and prevention programs in an adaptive manner. With this purpose and to identify further solutions for conflict mitigation, we call for a pan-European database of damage occurrence, management actions and associated costs.

Subfields: Ecology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Small Animals

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a63521e29145d7b975fabdff1ce19583e7738583

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In Ecology

1. J. López‐Bao
2. L. Santini
3. N. Selva
4. Francesca Cagnacci
5. L. Boitani
6. D. Ćirović
7. Luigi Maiorano
8. H. Andrén

In Small Animals

1. J. López‐Bao
2. Miha Krofel

Citations in the corpus

• Large carnivore expansion in Europe is associated with human population density and land cover changes (2021, background): “This is particularly the case in countries where the species returned after a long period of absence and preventive measures were abandoned, and thus, compensation is favoured over prevention (Bautista et al., 2019).”