The scale of the underlying crisis is sobering. The 2019 global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimated that roughly one million animal and plant species face extinction. The 2023 IUCN Red List catalogued 150,388 assessed species, of which 42,108 are threatened. Recent global threat assessments indicate that human-wildlife conflict contributes to population declines in approximately 26 percent of all threatened and near-threatened mammal species, primarily through persecution, retaliatory killing, and depredation of crops and livestock. For large carnivores such as tigers, lions, leopards, and wolves, conflict-related mortality is a dominant threat, and it ranks among the top three immediate pressures on elephants, primates, and large herbivores.

Global policy has begun to respond. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework explicitly calls, under Target 4, for halting human-induced extinctions, supporting species recovery, and managing human-wildlife interactions sustainably to promote coexistence. Yet Batar contends that most conservation practice remains trapped in a binary mindset that separates conflict from coexistence as if they were fixed, opposing categories. That reductionist view, he argues, fails to capture how relationships between people and animals shift over time and space in response to historical legacies, governance decisions, livelihood pressures, cultural values, and the behaviour of wildlife itself.

To replace this binary, the paper introduces a feedback-based dynamic model built around five recurring configurations: conflict, coadaptation, coexistence, coexistence conflict, and harmonious coexistence. Crucially, these states are not stages on a one-way road. Systems can move forward, slip backward, or loop between configurations depending on ecological change, policy shifts, economic incentives, or climate shocks. Four mechanisms—interactions, relationships, impacts, and broader structural drivers—generate reversible feedback loops that determine whether an encounter escalates into violence, settles into tolerance, or matures into something deeper. Stability in any configuration, the model insists, depends on continuous negotiation, adaptive responses, and flexible governance rather than any fixed endpoint.

Each configuration is illustrated with concrete cases. Conflict, the most familiar state, arises when interactions produce negative consequences for either side, as seen in India and Sri Lanka, where agricultural expansion into elephant habitat has intensified crop raiding and retaliatory killing. Coadaptation describes mutual behavioural adjustment: around Gir National Park, pastoralist communities show high tolerance toward Asiatic lions while the cats adjust their movements around villages, and in Kenya the Lion Guardians programme helped shift Maasai norms from retaliatory killing to active stewardship as lions learned to avoid settlements. In northern Botswana, reinforced livestock kraals and consistent night herding reduced losses so effectively that lions began avoiding the protected enclosures altogether.

Coexistence, in this framework, is not the absence of conflict but a managed adaptive balance in which tolerable levels of risk are sustained through evolving interactions, social attitudes, and governance. Community-based livestock insurance and changing media portrayals have helped communities in Nepal and India adjust to snow leopards, while rural Europe has moved from wolf eradication toward compensation schemes and conservation education. But coexistence remains fragile. Climate change, policy reversals, or economic instability can destabilise it, and unresolved grievances can harden into what Batar calls coexistence conflict—a configuration of latent tension beneath apparently calm arrangements. The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve exemplifies this: elephant conflict has been mitigated, yet communities continue to resent restrictions on land rights, resource access, and exclusion from decision-making, generating passive resistance and legal disputes rather than open confrontation.

At the aspirational summit of the model sits harmonious coexistence, in which wildlife is regarded not as a competing or threatening entity but as an intrinsic part of human cultural and ecological systems. The Satoyama landscapes of Japan, where traditional agriculture and forestry integrate biodiversity into everyday life, and India’s sacred groves, protected through spiritual governance, cultural taboos, and traditional ecological knowledge, demonstrate that such deep integration is possible without heavy-handed state enforcement. Even this state, however, is not permanent; demographic shifts, policy transitions, or weakening institutional support could push systems back toward coexistence conflict or renewed conflict.

Building on these five configurations, the paper proposes the CEAA Framework—Core Principles, Evaluation Criteria, Actions, Achievements—as a heuristic decision-support tool for guiding human-wildlife dynamics toward harmonious coexistence. Its five core principles are deliberately action-oriented. Recognize means identifying the ecological, social, cultural, and institutional drivers shaping local dynamics while acknowledging community knowledge systems. Retain focuses on protecting functional habitats and sustaining traditional livelihoods and governance. Resource demands equitable, sustainable management of shared natural resources. Restore calls for rehabilitating degraded ecosystems and reconnecting fragmented corridors. Reconnect aims to rebuild socio-ecological and cultural linkages between people, wildlife, and landscapes, restoring trust and revitalising traditional relationships with nature.

These principles are paired with evaluation criteria borrowed from programme assessment—relevance, coherence, importance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability—each of which can be operationalised through measurable indicators such as conflict frequency, wildlife movement patterns, cost-benefit analyses, and multi-year monitoring of ecological and social trends. The framework then organises actions at two levels. Institutional and policy actions include empowerment, collaboration, capacity building, and engagement, while societal actions span reconciliation, resilience-building, and a progression from cohabitation through coadaptation and coexistence toward harmonious coexistence. Batar notes that these actions inevitably involve negotiated trade-offs—balancing strict protection with livelihood needs, or prioritising certain species and places when resources are limited—and that the framework prescribes no single optimal solution, instead structuring the identification of options and the monitoring of outcomes over time. He points to India’s Lifestyle for Environment initiative, launched at COP26, as an example of behavioural transformation aligned with this vision.

The framework’s achievements are framed against global milestones: conflict mitigation toward a Nature Positive world by 2030, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and ultimately the UN 2050 Vision of Living in Harmony with Nature. The paper is explicit that detailed, case-specific applications remain future work, and that the framework is conceptual rather than a fixed statistical model—each component can be linked to existing social-ecological datasets, conflict records, participatory assessments, and policy processes. What it offers, in the end, is a shift in perspective: away from treating wildlife as a problem to be managed and toward understanding human-wildlife dynamics as a living, adaptive system that India, and countries facing similar pressures, can deliberately steer toward mutual flourishing.

Subject of Research: A transformative conservation framework for human-wildlife dynamics and coexistence in India

Article Title: A transformative conservation framework for advancing human-wildlife dynamics in India

Article References: A transformative conservation framework for advancing human-wildlife dynamics in India. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-026-00075-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-026-00075-1

Keywords: human-wildlife conflict, coexistence, transformative conservation, CEAA framework, biodiversity conservation, India, coadaptation, harmonious coexistence, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, governance, large carnivores, sacred groves