Risks arising from wildlife conservation: Characteristic analysis of wolf‐human conflicts in the eastern Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau

Abstract The Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau (QTP), a global biodiversity hotspot, exemplifies both the achievements and challenges of China's development paradigm that considers both environmental protection and socioeconomic progress. While conservation policies have facilitated wildlife population recovery across the QTP, they have also intensified human–wildlife conflicts, particularly with gray wolves ( Canis lupus ), posing new challenges for biodiversity conservation. Although wolf‐human conflicts have been extensively studied worldwide, critical gaps persist regarding the influence of large‐scale conservation policies in Asian high‐altitude ecosystems and the specific socioeconomic and ecological drivers of wolf‐human conflicts in protected areas following recovery of wolf populations. This study addressed these gaps by analyzing household socioeconomic data and ecological variables from the Tao River National Nature Reserve in the eastern QTP. Using a mixed‐methods approach combining questionnaire surveys and semi‐structured interviews, we surveyed 150 households across 41 settlements and 14 survey points, obtaining 142 valid responses. Binary logistic regression and hierarchical partitioning analyses identified key factors influencing whether respondents or their livestock would be attacked or harassed by wolves. Results showed that wolf conflict risk increases with distance to guard station and declining grassland quality. Households highly dependent on grazing income, lacking migrant work experience, with an increased number of livestock, and with lower annual household incomes were most vulnerable. Grazing income (with an influence weight of 20.67%), changes in livestock number (16.34%), and migrant work experience (6.60%) were the primary conflict drivers. We propose integrated mitigation strategies including risk‐based grazing management, compensation schemes, protective husbandry practices, livelihood diversification, and community‐based monitoring to foster human–wildlife coexistence and support sustainable ecosystem management in the QTP.