The study, conducted by researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Sussex and other partners, finds that the distance between homes and workplaces is the primary driver of car commuting. 

Earlier, the usual discussion around city planning was based on overall city density and transport connectivity but according to the researchers, these factors are secondary.

“Distances to city centres and working places are key. And urban densification cannot be viewed in isolation: one must understand how urban density relates to secondary factors such as connectivity, accessibility and the choice of residential location,” Felix Wagner, the lead author of the study said.

The observation is based on millions of mobility data points from six cities: Berlin, Boston, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá.

One size fits all doesn’t work

While the main crux of the study revolves around ensuring homes are located close to city centres, leading to less commute and reduction in GHG emissions, the researchers also argue their solution implementation might vary from city to city.

“Our data show that a single measure can significantly shorten commuting distances in one neighbourhood, yet have little effect two kilometres away. This spatial specificity has been missing until now,” Wagner argued.

The study divides the cities into two broad classifications: monocentric cities — jobs and economic activity are concentrated in or around one main centre — like Berlin and Boston and polycentric cities with multiple city centres, like Bogota and Los Angeles.

Based on the classification, the study argues, the approaches are very different.

In Berlin’s case, a monocentric city, the study argues for building more homes in areas that are already reasonably well-connected to that centre but are not yet densely built-up. The area stretches to a 26 kilometre radius from the city centre. For areas outside that stretch, building new homes nearby won’t solve the problem as they are simply too far from jobs for that to make a meaningful difference. Hence, having better public transport is the way forward so that people don’t have the need to commute by car.

For a polycentric city like Los Angeles, which has no one dominant city centre, simply building homes won’t suffice. What matters more in Los Angeles is how close people live to wherever their jobs are. Since those jobs could be anywhere across the city, the strategy should be to strengthen the local job clusters and build more homes near them, wherever they happen to be.

The zone where this approach can make a meaningful difference extends up to 36 km from any given employment hub. But even within that zone, the maximum reduction in car travel the study could measure was 2 km per trip — the smallest gain of any city in the study.

For people living beyond those employment clusters — in the outer areas where jobs are sparse and distances are long — building new homes nearby won't help. The same supplementary measures apply as in other cities: better public transport, stopping construction of new housing even further out into open land, carpooling, and working from home, the study argues.

Search for ‘tea plantations’ on the internet, and one will find picturesque rolling hills carpeted with mosaics of near-irridiscent green shrubs. If you ever find yourself standing in the midst of one in southern India, the open sea of green with mist hanging thick in the air comes alive with the chirping of birds and the rhythmic clatter of plantation workers. Every which way you turn, it’s the same visual. Tea, tea and more tea. Quaint and charming, yet strangely monotonous. A rather peculiar animal may yet make its presence visible here: the Asiatic wild dog or ‘dhole’.

The dhole is not as popular as its neighbours — the majestic tiger or the sleek leopard. But it is one of the most endangered carnivores in the world. Dholes are group-living animals on a strict protein diet, relying almost exclusively on the meat of other animals for food (hypercarnivory). We have been trying to unravel the secret lives of these enigmatic dogs for close to a decade now. Dholes usually prefer forest habitats and are shy of people. Their presence in human-altered tea and coffee plantations therefore raises a critical question: how do these elusive social carnivores live alongside people? Our recent study sought to find the answer.

Dholes in Valparai  

The Valparai plateau in India’s Western Ghats is a mosaic of tea, coffee, cardamom plantations (agroforests) dotted with rainforest fragments. The plateau stands adjacent to the larger Nilgiris landscape that produces upwards of 70,000 tonnes of tea each year, a portion of which is exported out of India.

The plateau is unique in that it blurs the line between the human world and the wild beyond recognition. The 100 sq.mi plateau, almost an island surrounded by forested Protected Areas, is home to over 70,000 people and their livestock. Living alongside the people is a rich diversity of wild animals that includes leopards, sloth bears, elephants, herbivore ungulates, primates, birds and reptilians.

To understand how dholes use this ‘inter-space’ we first painstakingly walked hundreds of miles looking for indirect signs (tracks and feces). We also set up dozens of cameras with motion-sensors, where animals clicked their own photos upon passing by. This allowed us to map areas that were used (or avoided) by the dhole packs of Valparai.

For a finer, more nuanced picture, we measured microhabitat features in different locations where individual dhole packs were seen resting, moving and hunting. We also collected their feces (scats) to examine what they were eating; specifically, we were keen to find out how much of their diet had wild ungulates versus domestic livestock.

Insights from shared human–wildlife spaces

Our expectations were built on years of research in Protected Areas. But our findings revealed a fascinating story of adaptation, which flipped the script. In protected forests, dholes largely occur where their primary prey species are distributed. But in the agroforests, their story was all about people. Their space-use wasn’t limited by wild ungulate prey; instead, their strategy involved choosing flatter areas far away from human settlements.

Dholes also preferred fragmented tree cover (rainforest remnants and eucalyptus plantations), indicating that they remain somewhat forest-dependent, even in human-dominated landscapes. At a finer scale, dhole packs chose microhabitats that offered a strategic trade-off between dense cover (for refuge) and clear sightlines to facilitate vigilance and hunting opportunities.

A look into their diet showed that dholes mostly fed on wild prey species, with sambar deer and gaur topping the menu. This, despite the high availability of domestic livestock in the landscape. A substantial number of samples also had chicken feathers; but from our understanding of the landscape, there were no records of them hunting poultry. Some post-hoc targeted camera-trapping revealed that the poultry was being consumed from inadequately managed open meat-waste dumps.

Human-wildlife coexistence in production lands

Dholes have disappeared from >80% of the areas where they once occurred in the last 100 years. Remnant populations are largely confined to the protected forests of South and Southeast Asia. Given this context, their presence and their adaptability to thrive in agroforests offers hitherto untapped conservation potential of these landscapes.

Our findings challenge the conventional notion that conservation strategies need to be focused exclusively within the boundaries of national parks, and that agroforests are just ‘green deserts’ devoid of life. Across South and Southeast Asia, commodity agroforests cover an enormous area; oil palm plantations alone span over 20 million hectares. When combined with expanses of rubber, tea and coffee, these agricultural lands create a substantial working landscape. Since these lands are often located within the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, they hold immense potential for protecting biodiversity.

But commodity production is profit-driven with land-use decisions by producers and companies influenced by production scale, labour costs, and government interventions. Future changes, as in the case of Valparai’s land-use, driven by growing tourism, new infrastructure, or the intensification of agriculture, could upset this delicate balance.

Considered together, our work demonstrates that human-dominated landscapes, like the agroforests of India’s Western Ghats, can serve as vital ‘coexistence landscapes’ that support both human livelihoods and the needs of wild animals. This does not diminish the importance of legacy Protected Areas; rather, the implication is that we must adopt a forward-thinking approach to conservation, elevating the focus on secondary habitats in our conservation discourse.

So, today on World Dhole Day, as you sit back with a cup of steaming tea, know that there’s a lot more brewing underneath. The survival of one of the world’s most endangered carnivores might just depend on how we manage the very landscapes that produce our daily brew.

Abraham Pious is a former member of The Dhole Project, and currently associated with Ashoka University where he works on Himalayan carnivore ecology. He is broadly interested in behaviour and population ecology, conservation education and outreach.

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth