About the Project

Rainforest mammals support both forest biodiversity and rainforest peoples’ lives and cultures. Over the past 30 years, however, rainforests have faced a sharp increase in hunting pressure and declines in wildlife populations. As international attention was drawn to this wildmeat crisis, rainforest governments established protected areas and imposed strict hunting restrictions. But this has caused restrictions even on local subsistence hunting, provoking conflicts with conservation officials.

To address the wildmeat crisis, the project aims to introduce wildlife management systems to enable subsistence hunting in five sites of the world’s three major rainforest regions. We take a coproduction research approach, where conservation governments (science) and local people (indigenous and local knowledge, or ILK) plan, conduct and evaluate research on an equal footing. Our coproduction research, which assumes no superiority of science over ILK, will create five different management systems in the five areas. The detailed descriptions of building the five management systems will help verify the effectiveness of the coproduction approach in environmental issues.