Podcast: Land sharing or sparing

Hello and welcome to Sixty Seconds Spotlight. I’m Dr Tracie McKinney, a biological anthropologist at the University of South Wales. My research focuses on primates like monkeys, apes, and lemurs, and how these animals interact with humans and human-altered landscapes.

The amazing animals that I study are in trouble.  About 60 per cent of non-human primate species are threatened with extinction, so conservation is a big issue for primatologists. 

There are a lot of different strategies for conserving endangered species.  One major division is between what is sometimes called “land sparing” and “land sharing” approaches. 

“Land sparing” is a more traditional conservation approach in which land is reserved for wildlife, and humans are excluded.  Wildlife reserves are a good example of this strategy.  However, there are sometimes practical and ethical issues with focusing only on wildlife, and not on the people who make their livelihoods from these landscapes.

“Land sharing” strategies work to conserve wildlife within human-altered environments.  This can be conservation of urban wildlife, for example, or working on ways to make farms or other landscapes more habitable for wildlife.  In this case, we recognize that animals live in a modified environment, but we still work to protect them in those spaces in the best way we can.

Both land sparing and land sharing approaches are vital for wildlife conservation.  While we want to preserve as many wild spaces as possible, we must recognise that many animals share space with humans, and we need to do our best to care for both the animals and the people who live in those landscapes.