Brown bears breaking into homes, wild boars stopping subway trains.
In 2026, the wild isn't staying in the wild anymore.
China's conservation efforts are working so well, in fact, that animals are showing up where they don't belong.
We'll take a look at what happens when success creates conflict and the new law trying to make coexistence possible.
Coming to you live from our studios in Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm Steve.
Thank you very much for being with us today.
And for the show, I'm with Yushan and Feifei.
First up, we used to think of wildlife conservation as a distant effort to save animals in the deep wild.
But in 2026, the wild has come to our doorstep.
From brown bears breaking into homes in Qinghai to wild boars disrupting subways in Nanjing, the boundary between human civilization and nature is disappearing quickly.
And it's not just an animal problem.
It's a humanitarian issue and an economic challenge.
Today we're going to talk about the price of success.
And what that means is how China's thriving ecosystems are creating new front lines of conflict.
That and how the landmark 2026 Ecological and Environmental Code is rewriting the rules of coexistence.
Yuxuan and Feifei, hi, how are you doing today?
Really kind of complicated issue.
It is affecting us here in China.
It's a world issue as well.
We're going to talk about that too.
And it's a very, very, very tricky line to try to walk.
Exactly, Steve.
And when we're talking about?
Well, there is a term actually about these problems globally is called human wildlife conflicts.
And that describes, you know, the negative effects, impacts that happened between humans and wildlife.
For example, in many countries, for example in Zimbabwe, there are national park authorities.
They reported 62 human deaths in 2025 alone.
That's caused by wildlife such as crocodiles and elephants.
And that happens in other countries as well, in North America, in South America and also here in Asia.
So globally, human wildlife conflicts affect over 75 of the world's wild cat species, according to the United Nations figures, as well as there are also other types of animals like elephants, polar bears, and also there are incidents of conflicts between humans and birds.
Yeah, it's not a short list and it's the negative impact of wildlife on human civilization, but it's also the negative impact of human civilization on wildlife too.
And yes, in North America I think it was in January of this year there was a high profile survey attack of a mountain lion.
I think it was on a hiker in Colorado.
That's a very rare instance, but it still happened in Peru and Uruguay.
Sea lions have been found to destroy or steal up to 46 of fishers' catches in malaysia.
You mentioned malaysia.
There's issues there as well.
Agricultural operations large scale ones at that reported losing about 145 000 us dollars a year to elephant related crop damage, forcing them to spend millions on wildlife corridors is what they call them there to survive.
And something happened recently in australia too, to a young canadian woman, And I want to come back to that a little bit later, maybe before we finish our chat today.
But the balance between wildlife and humans to peacefully coexist, it's a really delicate one.
And if that balance leans too far in one direction, Yuxin, things can start to go wrong.
Yeah, actually, here in China, human wildlife is a kind of a symptom of conservation success.
And decades of reforestation and hunting bans have led to a population explosion of some species, like wild boars, and the recovery of apex predators.
Now, in a vacuum, that's good news, right?
More numbers increase numbers of the species.
Yeah, but in fact, when we're looking at the habitats of these animals, for example wild boars or predators who can be very have this nature of attacking,
Aggressive behavior.
Yeah, so when they sense danger.
And we have about 4 million people living in, for example, China's nature reserves.
That means they have a very close relationship, a high chance of having direct interactions with this wildlife.
I think one of the highest profile example that we can offer here is in Yunnan back in 2021, where a group of Asian elephants traveled hundreds of kilometers 500 kilometers in that province and it got international headlines.
It was a family, right?
It was a family.
It was about 15, more than one family.
I remember this story.
I didn't realize it was from China, actually.
Yeah, I remember the story.
I think I even covered it on my radio show, actually, in Korea.
Yeah, this family of elephants was just making a trek, right?
If I remember correctly, they were looking for a new home.
Yeah.
At that time, I don't think people are really sure about what's happening, why they travel.
Because Asian elephants, they always travel around season.
But in that case, they travel further than usual.
And that's why people start to track why they are wandering.
It has always been one of the issues or the incidents that these villagers may come across.
Because the reports are saying that they're kind of getting used to the interaction of wild.
They're not interacting with them, they're just leaving their house or their their farmlands there to let the wild elephants to go in.
And of course maybe some authorities may to to intervene, but the villagers they're kind of getting used to the life with these wild elephants and i think that is also one of the ways that chinese people are saying.
It is the, I think, coexistence with these wild creatures because of course they are stepping on the farmlands, stepping on the crops and everything.
What is taking the responsibility?
And, of course, the local authorities.
They are paying for all the losses.
These villagers yeah, and the animals are not to blame here.
They're not doing yeah, they're not doing anything out of the ordinary.
Right as of early 2026, over 14 provinces and regions have implemented specific compensation measures to handle the rising costs of crop destruction.
Also, livestock predation.
Provinces with high incidences of human-wildlife conflict.
Yunnan is one example.
Qinghai is another example.
Sichuan is another example.
The list goes on.
They were among the first to formalize these systems.
Fei-Fei, you had a chance to talk with an expert about this exact topic.
Yes Stephen, you have mentioned that Qinghai has one of the highest chances in China to see this kind of human-wildlife conflict.
And in particular, we're talking about the Tibetan brown bears.
They are one of their primary sources of these conflicts.
So I had the chance to speak with Professor Xie Yi.
He's from the Beijing Forestry University and he's been working in a prefecture in Qinghai called Yushu.
And they are solving the conflicts between the local people there and the brown bears.
I asked him about the work he does and what type of conflicts usually arise between the local people and the bears.
In 2020, I conducted a field survey on human-virus conflicts in Qinghai.
More recently, we have been working on mitigating human-virus conflict since 2023.
We have successfully developed five types of technologies, including online monitoring, intelligent recognition, early warning system, physical fencing and deterrence equipment.
Usually there are three types of conflicts over there.
The first is the Brombeer as the predator for local people's livestock.
And also Brombeer, they will destroy or destruct the local people's house and other facilities.
And you know the worst situation is, the Brombeer will have threatened to local people's life security.
I can give you one case.
A brown bear broke into a herd statement.
It destroyed the windows and the doors of 11 rooms with economic losses over 10,000 yuan.
Such brown bear house destroying.
Incidents happen more than a hundred times every year in Yushu prefecture.
A hundred times a year.
And only in one prefecture.
A hundred times a year this is happening.
Yes.
Goodness me, that's obviously multiple times a month.
And well, it's also because of the geography, because that county or prefecture called Yushu is very close to a national park called Sanjiangyuan National Park.
And so it's one of the places where you have the overlapping habitats of humans and wildlife like brown bears.
And there are also animals like snow leopards and other things.
So they are also always being sort of higher chance of seeing direct interactions between predators like a brown bear, and they can be very dangerous and they are also very clever.
He talked about five different—and they're trying to solve this problem actually with reduced damage to humans and their houses and their livestock and their lifestyles, but also trying their best to protect the bears too.
He mentioned five types of technology.
Yes, first of all, they were using a lot of monitoring and tracking system.
I think we have a sort of a glimpse when we're seeing in the Asian elephant case in Yunnan that scientists are using technologies like drones and other type of system to keep an eye and on where this wildlife is about and how are they doing and if they're getting close to human habitats and they are in placing, as he mentioned, early warning systems.
I wonder if the drones are meant to track their real-time movements or just their maybe it's both, or I was going to say just their general movements throughout any given day, to see where they go and what they're doing, so that they can keep an eye on them.
Probably a combination of the two.
I think so, yeah.
And when I was seeing the reports, a lot of these drones are flying above them and trying to predict the way or the route that they're going, so that they can have maybe, a warning to the villagers alongside the route.
And I think that is also one of the ways that People can actually do and, at the same time, not affecting the movements of them.
And also, I think, but for a place like as vast as the San Jiangyuan National Park, as you show, it's very difficult to to have a drone flying over the sky all the time and keeping track of everything.
You can't follow.
You can't have one drone per bear.
That's not reasonable, right?
So it would be difficult to follow all of them all the time.
And actually Professor Xie also told me it can be one of the challenges when they are trying to implement this kind of intelligent monitoring system in that region in Qinghai, simply because the vast land area it covers and also because of the harsh environment on the plateau.
We are talking about the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, and it's also a challenge there.
But I think they're using other ways of technologies, for example, infrared cameras.
And I think they found through years of surveying, as Professor Hsieh mentioned, they found a danger window when these brown bears tend to, you know, appear near a human hesitation.
Like a window of time during a day?
Yeah, they found, especially at night, roughly between 845 pm to 230 am in the next day is, you know, kind of like a bear curfew.
See, that would be a scary time, because that's a time of relative inactivity, I would think for human beings who would just be resting in their homes, particularly the later it gets into the night.
Okay, so that's the Tibetan brown bear, but there's also an issue with wild boars.
The wild boar population, as I mentioned before, in China is now estimated at over 2 million and they were removed from the three value, which means ecological, scientific and social protected list in 2023 to allow for more flexible management.
And here's the thing in nanjing, it has become a global case study for urban human wildlife conflicts because in april 2025, wild boar famously charged into the jiangsu television station goodness.
And in August 2005, drones captured a neat formation of six boars swimming across the famous Yangtze River to colonize new urban greenbelts.
And then, in late 2004, a boar train collision near Nanjing South Station led to the death of a railway worker, and this event spurred the Civil Aviation and Railway Administration to implement the new wildlife-proof fencing protocols across eastern China.
Yeah, so you know wild boars when we're talking about wild boars, I think for a lot of us, seeing that on the news like six boars swimming across the river sounds like a really fun story.
But in fact, for provinces like Shanxi and Sichuan, where there are a lot of farmlands, These wild boars would be a destroyer basically to their crops and to their livestock.
I think I've read a report saying that with five or six wild boars they can devastate one plot of corn in less than an hour through feeding and also trampling.
So it's a major issue.
And they're also like smallholder.
You know a lot of farmlands here in China are smallholder farmers.
And they've reported, for example, in Shanxi, they can lose up to 40 of their annual yields in a single week because of these wild boar activities.
So it can be very devastating on their part when they are seeing these kind of conflicts.
And it's also wild boars can also be very dangerous as well.
They can, and they're fast.
Yeah, they can get up to about 30 miles per hour.
I was reading.
They're really aggressive.
They have um, these large tusks oftentimes that are really obviously dangerous for lacerations and they can carry dangerous diseases too.
I saw a heartbreaking video.
It broke my heart to see this um.
At first glance it seems kind of funny, kind of like you know maybe, watching the boars swim across the river.
It was a wild boar that had gotten into a restaurant, and the CCTV camera in the restaurant captured it all.
And obviously the customers in the restaurant were freaking out.
They were losing their minds.
So that was scary for them.
But it was heartbreaking for me to watch that animal in there because you could tell it didn't mean to necessarily go in there, right?
It was scared and it was panicking and it was a tough watch.
And I forget the conclusion of that story.
It doesn't matter, I suppose, right now.
But these are exactly the types of things that we're talking about.
Now there's a third case and this one maybe seems the most innocent of the three, yet still problematic and that involves birds.
Yeah, birds can create this conflict.
I think it can be very surprising to most of us.
You know, birds are not necessarily predators.
They won't be attacking your homes or your livestock.
But... they will, for example, quote-unquote, steal the yields of farmland.
The crops of the farmers.
Yeah, the crops.
So some farmers, for example in the province of Guizhou, they reported they lose up to 85 of their seed potatoes.
85%?
Yes, because of births.
And also when it comes to births.
And this is the tricky part is that Some of the birds are protected animals.
They're endangered.
So, from the farmer's point of view, Even though they suffered major losses, there isn't much they can do.
You can't kill them, first of all.
And also, even if it's not a protected species, for instance, it's also not okay to kill them.
But they're suffering losses.
So that put a lot of questions and responsibilities to the local governments on what they can do in these cases.
And that's why I said in the beginning, this is so tricky, because the core of this conflict is the what's the right word?
The overlapping habitats, isn't it?
Between human beings, wildlife in nature, and there can be other things that play.
For example, deforestation can force animals into towns or cities because they can't fight and find food where they used to find it anymore, but still it's this coexistence that that seems to suffer from the overlapping of where we both live, if you will.
You know wildlife is very active, but they also learn, and from their interactions with humans too.
They are very clever.
Yeah, these animals can learn from interactions with humans and also making conservation work more intricate.
Professor Xie also said, after he and his team put up electric fencing and an alert system for farmers' home near the mountains, which was isolated in the wilderness and constantly harassed by a brown bear, and they returned some time later to check on the system, only to find that the bear, realizing it couldn't get into the house, traveled further down to other houses.
And he also notes that these smart and also active animals have different personalities, even because some bears can be mild and like to stay away from human habitats, and some are just very fierce and tend to attack people humans, even hurting residents, and that can make the interactions with the animals or not again, not interactions, but just how to deal or what to do when you encounter the animals more confusing, because some might not be as aggressive as others, and actually that's an important part of the australian case i'm going to talk about in a little while.
Um yeah right, so the bear comes, and it sounds like a children's nursery story, doesn't it?
Bear comes to the house, this one can't get in, so goes to the next.
One can't get into this one, so it goes to the next one, and it keeps trying until it's successful.
Yeah, and so it's more of a case by case job.
Maybe this bear um, he real after it realized that kind of getting into this house, it will leave, but maybe another one will try to attack other homes, you never know.
So that's why we're talking about coexisting with wildlife, and the job related in this area can be very, very consuming a lot of time and also resources, And I also talked to Professor Xie about in general.
First of all, what are the commonly seen response measures in practice nowadays?
Let's take a listen about what he said.
Generally speaking, there are three types of measures adopted by authorities and communities.
Firstly, pre-incident measures such as early warning system and electronic fences and ironic fences, and wildlife population regulation.
Secondly, during incident measures.
They refer to emergencies, responses when damage occurs, including deterrence and life capture.
Thirdly, post-incident measures.
This means the incident has happened.
They involve relief or composition after the damage has taken place.
So what I mentioned is exactly this kind of measure.
Comparatively, I believe pre-incident measures are the most important.
Yeah, because the pre-incident measures, that would be kind of a frontline tool to create a physical barrier or maybe a sensory barrier between the animals and the humans to prevent the conflict before it happens, and i guess an electronic fence would be an example of that and i think the drones, i guess, would be an example of that too.
Yes, and so for example, even though professor xie he mentioned about he has been helping with local harassment, putting in place a lot of fencing equipment in qinghai and it's been quite effective actually, and also in yunnan, for example, they're also using similar technologies, like They're also using ground sensors to sort of also monitoring what's happening with Asian elephants in that region as well.
But there are also other types of pre-incident measures.
For example, there are these temporal segregation where they can manage human activities that, for example, enforcing a place where the herdsmen are not allowed to, you know, let out their animals.
So they're not allowed herding.
So grazing is not allowed, so that the people offered these buffer zones between where the wildlife would normally be active and where the humans live.
This is one of the pre-incident measures as well.
And I think there were also, as Professor Shim talked about, emergency responses when damages occur.
That's about.
For example, they are developing an AI-triggered acoustic and light deterrence Light deterrent.
Yes meaning.
For example, when the brown bears are getting close to a human home in the middle of the night and some of the deterrent equipment can send out sounds that they don't like, or have lights, that sort of meaning, that danger to them so that they'll go away.
And I think Professor also mentioned, he's also developing a spray with the scent that brown bears really hate.
So when a brown bear is getting close to a herdman, if he let out that spray, the brown bear will also leave.
That's what happened.
Those are kind of the during measures, if you will.
The post-event measures that he talked about.
That would be relief or compensation after the damage unfortunately has already taken place, when those prevention measures happen to fail, and I guess that's somewhat inevitable.
One of those post-event measures is the social insurance model.
Yeah, instead of some of the slow government payouts, 2026 marks the rise of subsidized commercial insurance, and in provinces like Yunnan, farmers pay a nominal fee, often 1 to 2 yuan, with the government covering the rest.
Insuring claims are settled by private insurers within 7 to 10 days.
And the premium is paid by three levels of government, provincial and also municipal and county.
When an, for example, Asian elephant ruined rice paddies in a village, the farmers called the agency to Claim damages, and also village level self-help funds is also helping in this situation.
Community managed pools of money that provide immediate emergency relief to families before formal government compensation arrives.
Yeah.
So this is the legal framework that we're talking about.
Right.
That's providing better assistance to the design community, and of compensation and insurance systems.
This is the China ecological and environmental code that we brought up at the beginning.
Yeah, and it's actually passed at this year's two sessions, just a few, one or two few weeks ago.
And according to that code, it mandates that provincial governments must establish diverse compensation systems.
So right now, the policy is turning from a recommendation to a legal obligation when it comes to provincial governments.
And also the code shifts the burden from local, for example, on the county or township governments to provincial and central government, where they have more of a financial resources when it comes to giving really, you know, handling out this compensation to farmers.
So it won't take... weeks or months or even years for the farmers to get that money back.
Yeah, because for some people that just doesn't really help at all.
I mean, because you need that money back quickly, right?
Yeah, this is the story that I wanted to share before.
This happened not that long ago, actually.
There was a Canadian backpacker in Australia.
She was 19 years old.
Her name was Piper James, and she was found dead on a beach after going out for a morning swim.
So this happened on Gauri.
If you've not heard of that before, I think it was called Fraser Island before.
It's a World Heritage listed island.
It's off the coast of Australia.
And so what happened was what they speculate happened was is that she was out for a morning jog.
And she ended up being attacked by a pack of dingoes.
You used to live in Australia.
Have you heard of dingoes before?
Not really.
I guess they're in the wilderness.
Yeah, they look like dogs, basically.
They look like domesticated dogs that you would keep in your house, but they are not domesticated at all.
These are wild animals that travel in packs.
And so the autopsy showed evidence of drowning.
Because the dingoes, and again, nobody saw this happen.
But this is what they speculate, I guess.
The dingoes, one of the things that they do is that they will force their prey into the water.
Now, if you think about it, a pack of dogs is chasing you.
Going into the ocean seems like a pretty safe thing to do, right?
Well, these dingoes, this is part of their strategy.
Because they get you out in the water and when you're out there you can't punch and kick comfortably.
And they swim very well and they'll bite.
So she ended up losing her life, and the government ended up euthanizing her.
I think it was six to ten of these dogs.
Now this became a really hot issue in Australia, in Gauri, because those dogs have been there for about four or five thousand years.
And they're really important to the local community.
And the Queensland government.
This was the response from the indigenous people who live there, who call it their home.
They found that to be really disrespectful, that the government euthanized these dogs because to them the dogs weren't doing anything other than what they normally do.
They were simply being wild animals.
There was a quote from a professor, a local professor along those lines.
And I wanted to share that story because it's really kind of what we're talking about today.
You know, when these incidents happen between humans and animals, are the humans to blame?
Well, no.
Yeah.
What was wrong with going on a jog on a beach?
Are the animals to blame?
No.
No.
So this is why having the right measures in place...
And to make sure that every animal is safe and every human is safe is of the utmost importance.
And it sounds like in different parts of China they're using every resource they can to make sure that that happens, including the latest technology.
So that is a good thing.
