BiodiverCities

Context

Greening cities and the expansion of urban areas into biodiversity-rich landscapes induce unplanned effects: urban wildlife. Entirely new human-wildlife encounters and cross-species learning are taking place at rapid evolutionary scales, making the multispecies cities of the future an important arena for potentially establishing new forms of coexistence. Coexisting with urban wildlife is not without challenges. Wildlife in cities has typically been given triage treatment of immediate problems rather than targeting underlying drivers. Urban wildlife increasingly gives rise to social polarisation, with some residents wanting to ‘save everything’ and others to ‘kill everything’.

There is a need to consider human-wildlife coexistence in cities beyond previous categories of either a mere wildlife problem to be resolved through short-term deterrence of animal behaviour, or a human problem that can go away by fostering pro-environmental attitudes. Instead, multispecies cities will require the development of an interspecies etiquette that recognises that problems and solutions are distributed across humans and wildlife and in their interplay.

Main objectives

BiodiverCities aims to address the complex challenges of urban biodiversity management by developing a comprehensive framework called an ‘interspecies etiquette’, which aims to both problematise and actively guide coexistence between human and non-human residents in cities. The interspecies etiquette will ultimately provide principles for biodiversity management at multiple levels, serve as practical decision-making support in human-wildlife conflicts, and engage communities in shaping their local urban environments. The interspecies etiquette comprises wildlife literacy, relationality and stewardship as its building blocks.

Main activities

BiodiverCities works with four principal case studies: Stockholm, Genk, Freiburg and Cape Town. While each case is unique, they represent globally generalisable wildlife conflict tropes and correspond to typical phases of wildlife exposure in their cities: from first encounters and initial enthusiasm to resistance, through backlash and polarisation, onto different pathways of management. In each city, a mixed-methods approach will first be used to map manifestations of interspecies etiquette. Surveys, semi-structured interviews, content analyses of local neighbourhoods, Facebook groups and news media, as well as spatiotemporal encounter analysis, encounter stories, reviewing of wildlife disturbance report data, and integrated community occupancy models will be used.

In subsequent work packages, human-wildlife challenges for studied cities will be synthesised together with stakeholders through the following ways:

• uncovering hidden preferences, policies and practices toward urban wildlife and examining how wildlife respond, adapt, and shape encounters and attitudes;
• developing strategies to enhance wildlife literacy, fostering stewardship, and navigating controversial interventions such as relocation, rescues, letting be and culling;
• producing communication tools to manage social polarisation around wildlife;
• enhancing training and educational resources for wildlife monitors, city officials, and pest controllers;
• building preparedness and infrastructure for public participation at various scales.