Assessment of the sustainability of bushmeat hunting based on dynamic bioeconomic models

Open-access hunting is a dynamic system in which individual hunters respond to changes in system variables such as costs of bunting and prices obtained for their catch. Sustainability indices used by conservationists ignore these human processes and focus only on the biological sustainability of current offtake levels. This focus implicitly assumes that offtake is constant, says little about the actual sustainability of the system, and fails to provide any basis for predicting the impact of most feasible management interventions. A bioeconomic approach overcomes these limitations by explicitly integrating both the biological and human components of the system. We present a graphical representation of a simple bioeconomic model of bushmeat hunting and use it to demonstrate the importance of considering system dynamics when assessing sustainability. Our results show that commonly used static sustainability indices are often misleading. The best method to assess bunting sustainability is situation dependent, but characterizing supply and demand curves, even crudely, has greater potential than current approaches to provide robust predictions in the medium term.