Human-wildlife conflict is amplified during periods of drought

Climate change–induced alterations to human-wildlife interactions are recognized to pose a fundamental challenge for global conservation initiatives. However, the extent to which specific climatic disturbances influence dynamics of human-wildlife conflict across different taxonomic groups remains poorly understood. Here, we leverage an extensive dataset of community-derived human-wildlife conflict incidents to examine the influence of drought, represented by the variation in summed precipitation over the prior 12 months, on conflict reporting. We show that prolonged decreases in precipitation are associated with increased overall conflict occurrences across taxa and are significantly associated with increased conflict with carnivore species in particular. A future with increasingly severe and frequent droughts could lead to resource scarcity that not only causes conflict between humans but also between humans and the natural world around them.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2025-11-12

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adx0286PMID 41223262PMCID 12609059
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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