A Sustainable Wild Boar Balance Plan?

Wild boar is a hunting resource that provides recreational value, climate-smart meat, and a food source in case of a crisis, and it contributes to biodiversity in the landscape. Simultaneously, the wild boar causes damage to agricultural crops and traffic accidents, and could contribute to the spread of African swine fever. In response to this, the National Management Plan aims for a 50 percent reduction in wild boar damage to agricultural crops and wild boar-related traffic accidents. This target should be met through, e.g., increased consumption of wild boar meat.
The purpose of this project is to analyze and estimate the potential for simultaneously increasing the consumption of wild boar meat while reducing the negative impacts of wild boar populations on agricultural crops and traffic accidents. We hypothesize that the success of such a strategy, a Sustainable Wild Boar Balance Plan, could vary across regions depending on wild boar population development and dispersal, costs of increased hunting and meat management, consumer demand, and the costs of preventing agricultural damage and traffic accidents. We examine whether such a plan is feasible in the long term and whether it is resilient to short-term shocks such as a societal food crisis or an outbreak of African Swine Fever.