Understanding constraints to adaptation using a community-centred toolkit.

Worldwide, marginalized and low-income communities will disproportionately suffer climate change impacts while also retaining the least political power to mitigate their consequences. To adapt to environmental shocks, communities must balance intensifying natural resource consumption with the need to ensure the sustainability of ecosystem provisioning services. Thus, scientists have long been providing policy recommendations that seek to balance humanitarian needs with the best outcomes for the conservation of ecosystems and wildlife. However, many conservation and development practitioners from biological backgrounds receive minimal training in either social research methods or participatory project design. Without a clear understanding of the sociocultural factors shaping decision-making, their initiatives may fail to meet their goals, even when communities support proposed initiatives. This paper explores the underlying assumptions of a community's agency, or its ability to develop and enact preferred resilience-enhancing adaptations. We present a context-adaptable toolkit to assess community agency, identify barriers to adaptation, and survey perceptions of behaviour change around natural resource conservation and alternative food acquisition strategies. This tool draws on public health and ecology methods to facilitate conversations between community members, practitioners and scientists. We then provide insights from the toolkit's collaborative development and pilot testing with Vezo fishing communities in southwestern Madagascar. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

A Nuanced Examination of Primate Capture and Consumption and Human Socio-Economic Well-Being in Kirindy Mitea National Park, Madagascar.

The futures of human and nonhuman primates are closely tied in protected areas. Understanding this interconnectedness is especially urgent in Madagascar, one of the world's most impoverished biodiversity hotspots. Yet, no study has evaluated the relationship between poverty and lemur hunting and consumption using a composite poverty metric that includes health, education, and living standards. To address this gap, and to inform primate conservation practice and policy, we administered annual surveys to 81 households over six consecutive months (September 2018 to March 2019) in a village on the border of Kirindy Mitea National Park, Madagascar. We observed extreme deprivation scores across multiple dimensions of poverty and identified ninety-five percent of households as 'impoverished'. Of these, three-quarters (77%) of households were identified as being in 'severe poverty'. One-fifth (19%) of all households hunted lemurs and half (49%) of households consumed lemurs. While poverty eradication is an urgent need in communities around Kirindy Mitea National Park, our findings show no relationship between poverty and lemur hunting and consumption, perhaps due to the lack of variance in poverty. Our results highlight the need to investigate other contributory factors to lemur hunting and consumption locally. Because food insecurity is a known driver of lemur hunting and consumption among the study community, and because domestic meats can be preferred over protected species, we recommend testing the efficacy of livestock interventions near Kirindy Mitea National Park.