With the return of large carnivores to significant areas of Europe, the interest in broad-scale, widely-applicable approaches to deal with resulting conflicts has increased. Since the most significant conflicts are based on depredation of livestock by large carnivores, compensation and damage-prevention measures have been put in place in many European countries. This requires significant financial investment, and many countries have been turning to their Rural Development Programmes, co-financed under the second pillar of the EU Common Agricultural Policy.

To date, however, little has been published on the different approaches used in the Rural Development Programmes to facilitate human-carnivore coexistence. In this policy analysis, based on work carried out for the EU Platform, the Secretariat describe how member states have included human-carnivore coexistence measures in their Rural Development Programmes across the EU.