Increasing livestock grazing, the unintended consequence of community development funding on giant panda habitat

Indirect approaches such as Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDP) aspire to combat biodiversity loss. Unfortunately, with increasing cases of failure, the link between poverty alleviation and conservation is now controversial. We revisited the earliest ICDP project in China after 12 years. The project area experienced increasing free-ranging livestock after 2004, which degraded the panda habitat. We collected livestock and socio-economic data using constructed household surveys and applied logit and zero-truncated Poisson models to understand the effect of ICDP. About 76% of livestock activities were in the panda habitat. Receipt of ICDP funds increased the chance of a household to become a livestock owner. The participation in ICDP also increased the numbers of both the traditional livestock — cattle by 83% — as well as the emerging type horses by 203%. Horses were encouraged for tourism and later raised for meat production. The income from alternative livelihoods such as tourism and off-farm jobs reduced the reliance on cattle but encouraged having more horses. Our results show that with the ban on logging and reduced cropland, assistance from ICDP facilitated the participants to accumulate wealth much quicker than others and to increase their livestock holdings. The immediate success in reducing reliance on certain natural resources and the community development of the short-duration projects could fail the long-term goals of conserving the endangered species habitat. Future conservation projects should either establish long-term mechanisms such as conditionality for incentives or create self-interests in conservation among the communities to cope with unexpected threats in the future.