Together with Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), we are deepening our understanding of the balance between nature conservation and economic development by studying conflicts between preservation and exploitation in different landscapes, and how to resolve them.

Economic development has progressed at a rapid pace in the last century, with rising living standards and striking reductions in poverty. This has been accompanied by environmental degradation, characterized by encroachment of natural habitats and unprecedented, often irreversible, biodiversity loss. Since 2025, FOS Co-Director Raji Jayaraman has worked with the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) to understand urgent threats to nature conservation, investigate potential solutions, and (where possible) evaluate their effectiveness.

Threats to nature conservation are varied. This research-practice partnership leverages FZS’s boots-on-the-ground, biodiversity know-how, and close connection with local communities and indigenous populations in and around the conservation areas they help protect. This allows for a customized approach to examining context-specific human-nature conflict challenges in remote tropical landscapes spanning vast biodiversity-rich protected areas in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

“In times of multiple crises, it is important to create interdisciplinary partnerships, especially between practitioners and researchers, in order to enable targeted action. In this context, the cooperation with Raji and her team is particularly innovative. For the first time, there is a research-oriented exchange on wide-ranging topics between conservation practitioners working in remote, biodiverse natural landscapes, and development economists. Even in the initial phase, it is already clear how approaches from development economics can break new ground and establish new ways of measuring impact. Ultimately, this can result in better protection of natural resources together with sustainable development in rural areas.”

– Dr Christof Schenck, FZS Director

In the Peruvian Amazon forest, this partnership investigates accelerators of illegal river gold mining and the effect of illegal mining on deforestation and river ecosystems. In Tanzania’s Serengeti plains, they evaluate whether community conservation banks promote conservation-oriented institutions and reduce poaching. And in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains, they ask how to make community agreements to curb illegal cattle grazing more effectively.