Reviewing the issues of Human-carnivore conflict vis-a-vis mitigation approaches of the Indian Sundarban

Sundarban, the single largest mangrove block in the world, is shared by India and Bangladesh. It has a rich biodiversity that provides staggering ecosystem services to local inhabitants for their livelihoods. Its top carnivores, tigers on land and crocodiles in the water, seem to protect the entire ecosystem, but lead to human-carnivore conflicts. Gradual ingression of saline water through tidal flooding into the rivers and creeks causes a threat to primary farming such as agriculture and aquaculture. Owing to the steady decline of earnings from farming, people living in the fringe zones of the forested lands are compelled to enter into the protected areas for collecting bio-resources without valid permits, resulting in inevitable conflicts with carnivores. In this context, a meta-analysis of human-carnivore conflict was done in the Sundarban to find out the causes, pattern, and trend of conflict of each type considering a variety of temporal, spatial, and societal parameters in order to provide a better understanding of the comparison to similar conflicts worldwide. These conflicts account for poor agriculture in one way and economically potential bio-resources in another, compelling local inhabitants to depend upon forest resources. To mitigate the conflict, there have been selective measures implemented. We review these measures as categorized into three different types, such as i) innovative approaches, conceptualized and then implemented ii) conventional approaches, applied when needed, and iii) protective approaches established for the conservation of both tigers and crocodiles. We synthesize the entire prevailing system and suggest a comprehensive conservation plan for the application that is flexible, involving adaptive management, a continuous process tested through trial and error. In this plan, actions are accessed, adapted, and tested again, eventually leading to a coexistence that is acceptable to the affected people and enables the tigers and crocodiles to continue playing their ecological function.