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Séminaire Economie Recherche Advanced economics Sur le campus

Public Economics and Policy Seminar - Anant Sudarshan (University of Warwick)

The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India

Publié le 29 août 2023
Lieu
Internef, 149
Format
Présentiel

Scientific evidence suggests that the Earth is undergoing a mass extinction of species, caused by human activity. Quantifying the social costs of losing non-human species is necessary to manage biodiversity and efficiently target conservation. We show that the functional extinction of vultures in India caused a meaningful increase in all-cause mortality because of a negative shock to sanitation. Vultures are an example of a keystone species, whose complex and unique ecosystem interactions create the risk of large changes in environmental quality if removed. In India, vultures played an important public health role by removing livestock carrion from the environment. The expiration of a patent for the widely used painkiller diclofenac led to a dramatic fall in its price and the development of generic variants. This enabled its use by farmers to treat cattle in 1994, a practice that unwittingly rendered carcasses fatal to vultures, leading to the fastest population collapse of a bird species in recorded history. Using habitat range maps for the affected species, we compare high to low vulture suitability districts before and after the veterinary use of diclofenac. We find that, on average, all-cause death rates increased by more than 4% in vulture-suitable districts after these birds nearly went extinct. We also find evidence suggesting that feral dog populations and rabies increased following this population collapse, and that water quality deteriorated in the affected regions. These outcomes are consistent with the loss of the scavenging function of the vultures.


 


Organisation

Sébastien Houde

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