Wildlife impacts and changing climate pose compounding threats to human food security

High-level policy debates surrounding elephant management often dominate global conservation headlines, yet realities for people living with wildlife are not adequately incorporated into policymaking or evident in related discourse.^1,2 Human health and livelihoods can be severely impacted by wildlife and indirectly by policy outcomes.³ In landscapes where growing human and elephant (Loxodonta spp. and Elephas maximus) populations compete over limited resources, human-elephant conflict causes crop loss, human injury and death, and retaliatory killing of wildlife.^4-6 Across Africa, these problems may be increasingly compounded by climate change, which intensifies resource competition and food insecurity.^6-9 Here, we examine how human-wildlife impacts interact with climate change and household food insecurity across the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, the world's largest terrestrial transboundary conservation area, spanning five African nations. We use hierarchical Bayesian statistical models to analyze multi-country household data together with longitudinal satellite-based climate measures relevant to rainfed agriculture. We find that crop depredation by wildlife, primarily elephants, impacts 58% of sampled households annually and is associated with significant increases in food insecurity. These wildlife impacts compound effects of changing climate on food insecurity, most notably observed as a 5-day shortening of the rainy season per 10 years across the data record (1981-2018). To advance sustainability goals, global conservation policy must better integrate empirical evidence on the challenges of human-wildlife coexistence into longer term strategies at transboundary scales, specifically in the context of climate change.^3,9-11.