Does Human Population Growth Increase Wildlife Harvesting? An Economic Assessment

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Abstract
A critical question in human dimensions of wildlife management in developing countries is: Does human population growth trigger overexploitation of wildlife stocks? We address this question with a behavioral model and demonstrate that conventional wisdom is incomplete and may be misleading. While increasing population pressure may, under certain conditions, be detrimental to wildlife stocks, the reverse also may hold. More generally, we find both direct and indirect effects of increased population pressure on wildlife stocks, but the direct effects will likely have a small impact on conservation. This is because when property rights to wildlife species are poorly defined or poorly enforced, humans will expand their hunting effort as long as hunting is more beneficial (profitable) than alternative activities, or until there are zero profits in hunting for bushmeat. Increasing the number of people does not necessarily affect this zero-profit threshold, and so the effect on aggregate hunting effort likely is small. We postulate that other changes in the socioeconomic environment (e.g., technical progress in hunting, improved infrastructure, habitat conversion) are more important for conservation.

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