How incentives saved Darwin’s man-eating crocodiles
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend a post-conference dinner at Crocodylus Park in Darwin, Australia. We ate outdoors surrounded by over a thousand crocodiles while Grahame Webb, the founder of the park, spoke to us about his work saving the crocodiles from extinction.
My favourite solutions involve aligning incentives to achieve the desired result, and the story of Darwin’s crocodiles is a good one.
Saltwater Crocodiles are reasonably common around Darwin, and they’re dangerous. They grow up to 5 metres long, can weigh up to half a tonne and eat people. Not regularly, but it happens. At a visitor centre in Darwin I flicked through a folder of news clippings on crocodile attacks, reassuringly the attacks are uncommon enough to be newsworthy.
Since their arrival in Australia the settlers hunted crocodiles for their skins, their meat, and because they were a threat to people and livestock. By 1973 the crocodile population was in danger and the focus switched from hunting crocodiles to helping then survive as a species.
However by 1980 the crocodiles were doing too well. The wild population was thriving and during 1979-80 there were four serious attacks on humans by crocodiles, two of which were fatal.
While conservationists were patting themselves on the back for saving the crocodiles from extinction, the general population was increasingly unhappy with the growing population. There were calls to start hunting crocodiles again.
At this point saving the crocodiles became a matter of convincing the community not to kill them all.
The proposed solution was to make the crocodiles as environmentally valuable to the community as possible, such that the economic value of the crocodiles would outweigh the threat they posed.
To the chagrin of many conservationists Webb turned is efforts to finding ways to derive economic value from the crocodiles. That’s how Crocodylus Park came to be. It’s not the only one, we drove past other crocodile farms .
“If the public valued crocodiles for economic reasons, added to their other values, there was public support for their ongoing recovery.” - Grahame Webb
During my trip to Darwin the town was flooded with people. University students partying after exams. Tourists from around the country enjoying the school holidays. The came for the mild weather, the national parks, and the crocs.
