Will the Experience of Human-Wildlife Conflict Affect Farmers' Cultivated Land Use Behaviour? Evidence from China

Effectively managing and mitigating "human-wildlife conflict" (HWC) by adjusting the use of cultivated land to realise the coexistence of humans and wildlife plays an important role in protecting biodiversity, ensuring food security, improving cultivated land use efficiency, and improving the livelihoods of community residents in nature reserves. Based on the "harmful experience-expectation change-behavioural adjustment" theoretical analysis framework and survey data on 1008 farmers in China's Giant Panda National Park, this paper uses a binary logit model and a mediating utility model to analyse the effect of HWC experience on the cultivated land use of farmers and the action mechanisms. The results show the following: (1) HWC experience increases the probability that farmers' cultivated land use behaviour will be adjusted, which will not only increase the probability that farmers' planting structure of cultivated land will be adjusted but also increase the probability that farmers will abandon cultivated land. (2) Farmers in the national park have a higher probability of adjusting their cultivated land use behaviour after experiencing HWCs than those outside the national park. Farmers in the national park mainly prefer to adjust the planting structure, while farmers outside the park are more inclined to abandon cultivated land. (3) Low-income farmers are more likely to adjust their cultivated land use behaviour after experiencing HWCs than high-income farmers. The low-income group mainly tends to adjust the planting structure of cultivated land, while the high-income group is more inclined to directly abandon cultivated land. (4) The farmers in the group with a high degree of dependence on cultivated land for their livelihood have a higher probability of adjusting their cultivated land use behaviour after experiencing HWC than those in the low-dependency group, and they tend to adjust the planting structure. (5) HWC experience mainly improves farmers' adjustment of cultivated land use behaviour by improving their awareness of future risks of HWC. In other words, "HWC" will change the behavioural decision-making of farmers and the differences in constraints, such as different regions and different income levels, will lead to differences in "HWC" affecting farmers' behaviours. The conclusions of this paper not only help in understanding the adjustment mechanism of farmers' cultivated land use behaviour in the context of HWCs but also provide a decision-making reference for actively changing cultivated land use methods to address HWCs.