Curriculum Wildlife & Nature Economics
Wildlife & Nature Economics
What animals and ecosystems are worth and who pays to protect them - Project Tiger, the ivory ban debate, human-wildlife conflict, community conservancies, pollinators, poaching, Project Cheetah, the vulture collapse, invasive species and new ways to fund conservation.
- What Is Wildlife Worth? How economists put values on wild animals and nature, from tourism and ecosystem services to the value people place on simply knowing species exist. 📄 Read-aloud
- Project Tiger: Saving a Big Cat How India's tiger conservation programme, launched in 1973, brought tigers back from the brink, and the economic trade-offs of protecting them. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Ivory Trade: To Ban or to Sell? The economic debate over how to stop elephant poaching - total trade bans versus legal, controlled sales - and what evidence suggests about their effects. 📄 Read-aloud
- Living With Wildlife: Conflict and Compensation Why conflicts between people and wild animals such as elephants cause deaths and crop losses, and how compensation, insurance and prevention can reduce them. 📄 Read-aloud
- Community Conservancies: Paying Locals to Protect Wildlife How giving local communities rights and income from wildlife, as in Namibia's conservancies, can turn poachers into protectors. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Economic Value of Bees and Pollinators How bees, butterflies and other pollinators support a large share of the world's crops, the threats they face, and why their decline is an economic risk. 📄 Read-aloud
- Wildlife & Nature Economics: Checkpoint 1 Quick checkpoint - five questions on wildlife values, Project Tiger, the ivory debate, human-wildlife conflict and pollinators. 5 questions
- The Economics of Poaching How demand, prices, enforcement and poverty shape illegal hunting of rhinos and other animals, and what economic tools can reduce it. 📄 Read-aloud
- Project Cheetah: Bringing Back a Lost Species How India reintroduced cheetahs from Africa in 2022, the costs and challenges of the project, and the debate over whether it is good value for conservation. 📄 Read-aloud
- The Vulture Collapse and Its Human Cost How a cheap cattle painkiller wiped out India's vultures in the 1990s and 2000s, and how economists estimated the surprisingly large cost in human lives. 📄 Read-aloud
- Invasive Species: The Hidden Invaders How plants and animals introduced to new places spread out of control, the huge economic costs they cause, and what can be done. 📄 Read-aloud
- Wildlife, Disease and Pandemics How diseases jump from wild animals to people, why habitat loss and wildlife trade raise the risk, and why preventing spillovers is an economic bargain. 📄 Read-aloud
- Paying for Conservation New and old ways to fund protection of nature - government budgets, debt-for-nature swaps, biodiversity credits and global targets like 30 by 30 - plus a recap of the module. 📄 Read-aloud