BU-led study used video games to test ways of balancing agriculture and conservation—and found getting more women involved in decision-making may boost productivity and the planet’s health.
BU-led study used video games to test ways of balancing agriculture and conservation—and found getting more women involved in decision-making may boost productivity and the planet’s health.
When a family of five-ton elephants stomps and chomps its way through your crops, there’s only one winner. And in the central African nation of Gabon, farmers are getting fed up with the giant animals trampling their fields—and their livelihoods.
In conservation terms, Gabon is a success story—protected areas and tough anti-poaching measures have allowed the numbers of critically endangered African forest elephants to stabilize. But with food prices rising, anti-elephant protests have been spiking too. “Some people cannot farm anymore—the elephants are eating so much of their crops,” Gabon’s environment minister Lee White told Reuters in 2022. “It has become a political issue and is eroding support for conservation and for the president (and) government.”
As Gabon’s leaders have learned, balancing conservation and agriculture isn’t easy: tilt policies in favor of farmers, and important habitats or species could be lost; tip efforts toward animals or land, and people may lose their livelihoods. Paying farmers to support the environment might seem like an easy answer—incentivizing them to conserve habitats. But a new study led by Andrew Reid Bell, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of Earth & environment, has found payments don’t always reconcile the tension between agricultural production and the planet’s health.
Read more at Boston University
Image: A BU-led research team used video games to test farmers’ reactions to conservation dilemmas. Here, they’re piloting a game in the Sambava region of northern Madagascar. (Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Reid Bell)
