New study identifies illegal hunting as a threat to China’s wildlife and global public health
Illegal hunting and trading of wildlife in China is becoming a significant threat to biodiversity and public health, according to a new paper by a team of researchers that includes two scholars from the School of Public and International Affairs. It is the first comprehensive assessment of this issue for China.
The paper, "Assessing the illegal hunting of native wildlife in China," appears in Nature today. Its co-authors are Dan Liang, Xingli Giam, Sifan Hu, Liang Ma, and David S. Wilcove. Liang is an associate research scholar at SPIA's Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE), and Wilcove is a professor of ecology, evolutionary biology and public affairs, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, as well as SPIA's acting executive vice dean. Giam, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, received his doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton. And Ma, currently an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Shenzhen, China, was an associate research scholar at C-PREE. Hu is a postdoctoral researcher at Sun Yat-sen University.
The researchers used Chinese court documents that tracked convictions for illegal hunting in the country, and then created a series of models to predict how much more widespread the extent of illegal hunting is beyond the individuals who were caught and prosecuted.
The court documents revealed a total of 9,256 convictions for the illegal hunting of more than three million individual animals from 2014 to 2020. Those animals represented more than 20% of China's bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian species, and included almost a quarter of the endangered species in those categories.
"We were very surprised by the large number of species that were illegally hunted in the space of just six years," Liang says.
"But of course," adds Wilcove, "only a fraction of the actual number of hunting incidents results in prosecution and conviction, so that means these numbers must be the tip of the iceberg. And so, we then applied various statistical methods to show that, in fact, the iceberg is very large indeed."
There is limited evidence in the field to suggest how much bigger the metaphorical iceberg is, but the researchers cited some of their ongoing work that indicates it's optimistic to think that even 1% of all illegal hunting incidents are detected and prosecuted.
The researchers were more conservative for this paper, though: for an extrapolation analysis, they assumed that 10% of all illegal hunting incidents had been detected and prosecuted and then estimated the total number of species that were likely hunted. They concluded that at least 28% of China’s native terrestrial vertebrate species, including 40% of its birds, may have been taken during this period. They further identified an additional 781 species, including more than 90 threatened species, that were likely to have been targeted by hunters over the course of the six years.
"Illegal activities are inherently very difficult to study because, by definition, people don't talk about them or practice them out in the open," Wilcove says. "It's quite a scientific challenge."
The paper shows that the illegal hunting incidents were widespread across the country, though there was a higher concentration in the areas closer to cities, which suggested that the illegal hunting was potentially done for commercial purposes and resell opportunities. “These sorts of spatial analyses can provide critical insights about the locations and habitats where illegal hunting is most intense, and they may also tell us something about the motivation behind the hunting,” notes Giam.
Additionally, the researchers found that only 5% of convictions accounted for 90% of the individual animals that had been illegally hunted, which suggested that large commercial poaching operations were responsible for much of the loss of wildlife.
The paper is clear that the illegal hunting of wildlife is a threat to China's biodiversity and creates a potential public health risk to the people of China because of the possibility of transmission of diseases from hunted animals to people. The researchers also note that the problem does not stop at China's borders.
"The rest of the world should also be concerned," Wilcove says. "First, the loss of biodiversity in China is a loss of biodiversity for the whole world. Second, there's no reason to believe that China is unique in terms of this problem. In fact, there's evidence of hunting depleting wildlife populations in many parts of the world. And third, disease outbreaks stemming from the wildlife trade have the potential to escape the borders of any one country."
Liang believes the approach the research team took in this study could be used to investigate the problem of illegal hunting in other countries. However, the actual results of the research in this paper stand alone as they relate to the problem in China and should not be used to characterize what’s happening in other countries.
"Illegal hunting is clearly a threat to China’s wildlife, but we also have to recognize that China is also doing a lot of things to address it," Liang says. He cites the Chinese government recently amending the National List of Protected Animals of China by adding 517 species, including 31 endangered species predicted by this study to be at high risk of being targeted by hunters. The country also enacted a ban in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic on the consumption of "wild-caught species," and it has deployed public information campaigns encouraging a reduction in the demand for wildlife products.
The researchers say they hope their study will generate additional interest in China in the problem of illegal hunting and will inspire other scientists to study this issue in other countries.
JOURNAL
Nature
ARTICLE TITLE
Assessing the illegal hunting of native wildlife in China
Subsistence poaching has little impact on biodiversity in the Amazon’s environmental protection areas
A study conducted in sustainable-use reserves shows that local game species become less abundant about 5 kilometers away from the nearest human community. The negative effects of anthropic activity can be mitigated by appropriate management strategies.
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE:
THE RESEARCHERS INSTALLED 720 CAMERA TRAPS IN 100 HUMAN COMMUNITIES INSIDE AND OUTSIDE NINE SUSTAINABLE-USE PROTECTED AREAS
view moreCREDIT: RICARDO SAMPAIO
The presence of Indigenous communities and traditional river dwellers in extractive reserves located in Legal Amazonia is not a threat to birds and mammals considered subsistence poaching targets, according to a study reported in the journal Biological Conservation.
Legal Amazonia is an area of more than 5 million square kilometers comprising the Brazilian states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins. It was created by federal laws from 1953 to promote environmental protection and development in the area.
The article advocates wildlife and conservation management strategies to mitigate the negative effects of poaching. These include combating local consumption of sensitive species such as tapirs, peccaries and curassows, and the sale of bushmeat in urban areas, mainly in the vicinity of cities and upland forest areas where fish and other aquatic protein sources are scarce or non-existent.
The study described in the article was part of the PhD research of Ricardo Sampaio, an environmental analyst at the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), an arm of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.
The authors show that the abundance of local game species begins to fall about 5 kilometers away from the nearest human community. In ecology, local abundance means the number of individuals of a species in a particular ecosystem.
The researchers deployed 720 camera traps near 100 local communities inside and outside nine areas of central and southwestern Amazonia; five are Extraction Reserves (RESEX), two are Sustainable Development Reserves (RDS) and two are state-run forests.
The camera traps recorded the presence of 29 bird and mammal species weighing more than 5 kg, including pacas, tapirs, curassows and guans. In areas where the community engages in or has access to sustainable fish farming, as in the case of the araipama or pirarucu in the Middle Purus and Juruá River in Amazonas state, the pressure on terrestrial species from subsistence poaching is lower.
“The main finding of the study was that the key factor in changes in species diversity, abundance and biomass is distance from human communities. Even so, we observed that human communities have little impact on biodiversity, demystifying certain discussions that question the extent to which sustainable-use conservation units protect biodiversity. Community-based wildlife management can be a way to assure food security while also protecting biodiversity in these areas,” Sampaio told Agência FAPESP.
The article was published just as environmental issues in the Amazon were coming to the fore again in the global debate on sustainable development, not least thanks to the Belém Declaration, which called among other things for measures to increase “native vegetation stocks by means of financial and non-financial incentives, and other instruments for conservation”. The document was issued on August 8 by eight heads of state representing the signatories of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) at the Amazon Summit in Belém, capital of Pará state.
“Practical results like the findings of our research project help create an environment for discussion and institutional processes to address the issue of subsistence poaching, which is a taboo in Brazil. The challenge now is to ensure that governments and agencies are aware of these findings and can translate them into practice,” Sampaio said.
The study was supported by FAPESP via a grant awarded to Ronaldo Gonçalves Morato, former head of ICMBio’s National Center for Research and Conservation of Carnivorous Mammals (CENAP). An earlier article by Morato and his group showed that distance from urban centers and availability of aquatic protein are the factors that most influence perceptions of the sustainability of game hunting among communities living in conservation units.
The other authors of the Biological Conservation article are Adriano Garcia Chiarello, a professor at the Biology Department of the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto School of Philosophy, Science and Letters (FFCLRP-USP) in Brazil, and Carlos Augusto Peres, a professor at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. This year, Peres won an International Champions Award in the inaugural Frontiers Planet Prize, as the lead scientist for one of the most promising recent research articles on sustainability-related topics. His prizewinning paper was published in the journal PNAS.
Pressure
According to the researchers, the study was one of the largest ever conducted using camera traps to assess the response of vertebrates to poaching in areas of the Amazon, which contains the world’s most biodiverse tropical rainforest. They also stressed that although the reduction in numbers of animals is due to pressure from poaching near human communities, the negative impact on the forest from more frequent fires, logging and domestic dogs used to hunt game may also drive away animals in the vicinity of communities. In fact, they found this to be the case for 13 of the species studied.
The findings have already had practical results, Sampaio said. When the researchers were doing fieldwork in the Riozinho da Liberdade RESEX (Acre state), the community there was discussing the effectiveness of a local agreement to regulate subsistence hunting, and there were disagreements about whether to allow dogs. They set up camera traps on both banks of the river. Dogs were allowed only on the right bank. They showed the images to the community, proving that on the left bank, where no dogs were allowed, there were more wild animals (which the locals themselves referred to as “bushmeat” or “game”).
“The meeting was attended by women and children as well as community leaders. They had lived in the forest all their lives, but many had never before seen certain animals before they saw these images,” Sampaio recalled.
Some months later, he continued, he received the minutes from a meeting where the images were used to support a collective decision not to allow hunting dogs anymore. “This decision was eventually adopted in the management plan for the conservation unit, which has rules defined by the community. It was one of the positive practical outcomes in terms of local decision-making and biodiversity conservation,” said Sampaio, who advocates combining scientific knowledge with the traditional knowledge accumulated by river dwellers and Indigenous communities.
Brazil’s federal legislation on conservation units establishes that extraction reserves are demarcated with the aim of protecting the livelihoods and culture of traditional people, such as river dwellers, Indigenous communities and quilombolas (inhabitants of quilombos, settlements originally formed by enslaved Africans who escaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), and assuring sustainable use of natural resources in the area.
These communities may harvest (“extract”) forest produce to earn a living while also practicing subsistence farming with some food crops and small animals. RESEX reserves are government property, and hunting by amateurs or professionals is banned.
About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.
JOURNAL
Biological Conservation
ARTICLE TITLE
Vertebrate population changes induced by hunting in Amazonian sustainable-use protected areas
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
28-Oct-2023
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