COS 96-1 - Increases in human-wildlife overlap will present conservation challenges and opportunities in the next 50 years

Abstract: Slowing biodiversity loss will require effective management of human-wildlife conflict and maintaining investment in conservation as the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanized. Key to this is the ability to forecast where humans and wildlife will overlap spatially as demographic and socioeconomic changes alter the human footprint and climate change shifts species distributions. We model changes in the spatial overlap of human populations and 26,314 terrestrial vertebrate species under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and IPCC climate change scenarios. By 2070, human-wildlife overlap will increase across 49% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, while decreasing in only 19% of the world’s surface. These changes are largely driven by predicted shifts in human population density and as a result of the growing demand for agriculture, rather than changes in wildlife distributions. We identified hotspots of changes in human-wildlife overlap and found them to mainly occur in newly expanded urban areas and agricultural areas. Increasing human-wildlife overlap driven by agricultural or urban expansion will require different conservation intervention strategies to mitigate human-wildlife conflict, and present opportunities to strengthen public support for biodiversity conservation through targeted efforts to expand ecosystem services . Our results provide the opportunity to develop targeted policies to plan and manage future development and highlight that increasing human-wildlife overlap need to be directly integrated into global efforts to effectively stem biodiversity loss.