Trophy hunting: Bans create opening for change

Nowak et al. demonstrate a deeply concerning lack of awareness of some key risks of banning trophy hunting in the absence of plausible alternative land uses. They inaccurately characterize our fears as being only about funding. Reduced funding for conservation is indeed a major concern: across just Africa’s protected areas with lions (including both tourism and trophy hunting areas), there is an estimated annual deficit of over US$600 million needed for effective management (1). Removing any existing revenue streams for those areas without substituting a replacement would be deeply irresponsible, and would harm local progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals that Nowak et al claim to value. There are areas where income from trophy hunting is indeed currently ‘unique’ – no adequate replacements are currently available. Pragmatism should not be confused with ‘defeatism’.

However, the true risk is not about losing funding per se – it is about losing funding streams that require the presence of trophy hunted species such as lions and elephants, and therefore incentivize conservation of their populations and habitat. Nowak et al. assert that ‘sustainable alternatives exist’. But they fail to provide evidence that the alternatives they mention have any prospect of imminently replacing trophy hunting anywhere beyond a minority of atypical cases. In particular, the idea that trophy hunting – which can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars from a single hunter, and conserves extensive habitat (2) – can be replaced with smaller-scale, lower-revenue approaches such as survival training and agritourism defies belief. Agritourism fundamentally and by definition depends on land conversion, which not only dwarfs any threat posed to species by trophy hunting, but is the main direct driver of global biodiversity decline (3). Moreover, they cite no example of agritourism anywhere in the world which could conceivably be compatible, or be adapted to be compatible, with the presence of wild lions or other dangerous megafauna.

The third biggest driver of biodiversity decline is climate change (3) and even in 2005, tourism contributed around 5% of global carbon emissions (4). Trophy hunting generates significantly more revenue per visitor than eco-tourism (5). Replacing hunting revenue would require hugely expanded numbers of tourists, bushcraft trainees and the like, with major implications for carbon emissions, water use, infrastructure construction, food provision and waste generation. Innovative forms of biodiversity finance offer potentially promising mechanisms to conserve wildlife and habitat, but currently (in Africa at least) these have mixed success, operate at small scale and rely on fickle voluntary finance sources. They are not yet ready for implementation across the vast majority of hunting areas. Furthermore, protecting carbon stores, for example, does not necessarily incentivize the conservation of viable populations of species previously given value by trophy hunting. We fail to see how the observational study of common property resource management in the Highlands of Ethiopia (Nowak et al.’s reference ‘11’) supports their case. Trophy hunting is no part of the system. There may be lessons in this study for successfully promoting the sustainable use of wildlife.

Nowak et al make several false assertions. Although colonial power relations were significant in establishing many protected areas across Africa (used now for both tourism and trophy hunting), it is untrue that trophy hunting ‘relies’ on deep political inequalities. Well-managed trophy hunting occurs across diverse geopolitical situations, including in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe (6). Furthermore, in several developing countries, historically marginalised rural communities play an increasing role in managing it and retaining benefits, although this varies widely. Nowak et al. also mention (as we did in our letter) the negative impacts of poorly managed trophy hunting, but these do not negate the well-documented positive conservation impacts of well-managed hunting, which would be damaged by Indiscriminate bans. In these cases of poor management, reform is anyway to be preferred to removal if alternatives are not available.

Nowak et al pay lip service to favouring conservation approaches which are equitable, bottom-up and involve community rights. However, import bans risks undermining some of the most locally-driven and equitable conservation models in Africa (e.g. community conservancies in Namibia). Tellingly, the authors support trophy import bans with reference to a poll of views of the American public on hunting. This study, Nowak et al’s reference ‘8’, reports that fewer than a third of Americans approve of any trophy hunting – it contains no data concerning attitudes specific to trophy hunting that are broken down by either taxon or country. If the US public are against trophy hunting, they could first ban their extensive domestic trophy hunting. Instead, US policy-makers are pushing for imports bans for trophies hunted outside of the US ( supported by Nowak et al) which affect the income and decision-making power of people elsewhere, largely in rural Africa. Such inequitable, top-down, non-participatory approaches seem in direct opposition to what Nowak et al claim they prefer. While we agree that NGOs and countries could match import bans with funding to offset negative impacts, we see no evidence that this has occurred to date, or will do so in future.

We wrote our Letter to highlight the potential risks associated with banning or restricting trophy hunting without better alternatives in place. We are not “for” hunting, and readily welcome viable alternatives. However, nothing described by Nowak et al suggests those alternatives are proven or viable at the scale required. Their superficially persuasive but ideologically driven note heightens our fears that the unintended negative consequences of trophy hunting bans are very likely to be realised.

1. P. A. Lindsey et al., More than $1 billion needed annually to secure Africa’s protected areas with lions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, E10788-E10796 (2018).
2. E. Di Minin, N. Leader-Williams, C. J. Bradshaw, Banning trophy hunting will exacerbate biodiversity loss. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 31, 99-102 (2016).
3. S. IPBES. (IPBES Secretariat Bonn, Germany, 2019).
4. D. Scott et al., Climate change and tourism: Responding to global challenges. World Tourism Organization, Madrid 230, 1-38 (2008).
5. P. A. Lindsey, P. Roulet, S. Romanach, Economic and conservation significance of the trophy hunting industry in sub-Saharan Africa. Biological conservation 134, 455-469 (2007).
6. IUCN, "Informing decisions on trophy hunting" (IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 2016).