Management implications of human livelihood strategies on Madagascar's coastal landscapes

Abstract

The unsustainable harvest and consumption of wild animals destabilizes both wildlife populations and the human livelihoods that depend upon them. In coastal landscapes, the overexploitation of terrestrial resources can increase pressures on marine ecosystems, and vice versa. We explore populations' ability to mitigate hunting pressure by bolstering marine livelihood strategies, assessing whether Malagasy people (or aggregated households) (1) transfer harvest pressure and consumption from oceans to forests in times of lower fisheries yields and (2) habitually exploit both marine and terrestrial resources. We also evaluate the diversity of fishers' and hunters' methods used and species targeted, as reliance on a limited range of resources elevates sensitivity to perturbations in resource access and forces people to shift across rather than within livelihood strategies when experiencing scarcity. We present data on annual marine and terrestrial wildlife use in western Madagascar, where cyclic droughts and famines exert pressure on local populations, and people depend on wild food sources from adjacent mangrove and dry forests. In a study village outside Kirindy Mitea National Park, we surveyed and interviewed 369 individuals (N = 89 households) and conducted 18 focus groups over 6 months (September 2018 to March 2019). We found that individual people tended to exclusively hunt or fish, and hunters pursued relatively few species with more specialized methods than fishers did. By distributing resource utilization across ecosystems, families likely increase household resilience. Therefore, conservation and alternative livelihood efforts will benefit from a regional-scale, multi-ecosystem approach.