Hasita Bhammar
Alumni
Hasita began her career in wildlife conservation at the age of 21 by setting up a community-based tiger conservation program in the Pench Tiger Reserve in India. She holds a master’s degree in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Environment where her focus was on species conservation and ecosystem management. After graduating, Hasita joined the World Bank led Global Wildlife Program. She supports over 30 projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America on combating illegal wildlife trade, promoting wildlife-based economies and enabling human-wildlife coexistence. She has been with the Global Wildlife Program for seven years helping drive the research, knowledge management and communication components of the program, and she helps coordinate amongst participating national governments. With field experience in India, Nepal and Kenya, Hasita was inspired to pursue a DPhil at WildCRU to understand and explore the relationship between human-wildlife conflict and poverty.
Her research will pilot a methodology that combines conservation science with development economics to estimate the impact of human-wildlife conflict beyond the direct or physical damage to land and livestock. It will quantify the hidden impacts of human-wildlife conflict i.e., its impact on household well-being and poverty indicators, such as income, health, nutrition and education. Understanding these impacts can provide insight into a households’ vulnerability to human-wildlife conflict risks, and it can help identify which households are more likely to fall into poverty traps. The research will facilitate solutions that can help communities cope with losses, improving tolerance towards wildlife and promoting conservation.
Hasita was selected as a 2020 Global Ambassador for 2041 Foundation, an organization whose mission is to inspire young people to preserve Antarctica.
Selected publications:
Bhammar, Hasita, Wendy Li, Christel Maria Moller Molina, Valerie Hickey, Jo Pendry, and Urvashi Narain. 2021. “Framework for Sustainable Recovery of Tourism in Protected Areas” Sustainability 13, no. 5: 2798. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052798
Lindsey, Peter, James Allan, Peadar Brehony, Amy Dickman, Ashley Robson, Colleen Begg, Hasita Bhammar et al. “Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, no. 10 (2020): 1300-1310.
Twitter: @HasitaB
