(Scientific American)

Declining wildlife populations has exacerbated child slavery in Ghana, Somali piracy and the illegal ivory trade. At least that’s the theory of a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who looked at how wildlife loss impacts conflict in places where people depend on wildlife to survive.

Justin Brashares and his colleagues say that the way governments and international organizations respond to crimes like poaching often do not address the full “ecological, social and economic complexity of wildlife-related conflict.” “We thought it was critical to connect the dots” among disciplines, said Brashares, the lead author of a paper published recently in the journal Science.

The connection between the loss of wildlife and human populations has also been underemphasized in academia, said co-author Douglas McCauley, an ecologist currently at University of California, Santa Barbara, who took part in the study as a postdoctoral student at UC Berkeley.

The original article here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-loss-of-wildlife-leads-to-child-slavery/

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