Natural Resource Use
Human society is used to putting a price tag on natural resources—on timber, oil, animal pelts, and ivory. But as the demand outpaces the supply, a new challenge has arisen: Finding an economic value for slowing down our consumption of nature’s bounty and treading more gently on our planet. To balance the needs of people and wildlife, WCS is working with industries involved in natural resource extraction, to help them manage their concessions more sustainably. WCS also assists local communities whose livelihoods depend on hunting, fishing, and the extraction of other natural resources in finding new economic opportunities that promote both human wellbeing and animal conservation. Finally, we are working on-the-ground with law enforcement agencies to stem the harmful wildlife trade.
Featured Projects
To help Cameroon stem the dangerous trade in bushmeat from forests to lucrative urban markets, WCS partners with the country’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry and the CAMRAIL national train network—in the past, a common means of transporting large volumes of wildlife.
From the Newsroom
The U.S. Forest Service designates the nation’s first wildlife migration corridor to protect the movement of North America’s fastest land animal, the pronghorn. These swift creatures number nearly half a million in Wyoming alone, but the proliferation of gas fields and housing development has sliced up much of their territory.