What struck Dr Hayley Clements about the debates around trophy hunting was that they rarely presented evidence and when they did, it was often anecdotal and drawn from individual places.
“I therefore wanted to know what the scientific evidence base presented as a whole. To my surprise, no one had yet attempted to identify and summarise all the evidence,” she said.
Clements, the Oppenheimer-Jamma research chair in African wildlife economies at the Centre for Sustainability Transitions at Stellenbosch University, took up the challenge, reading through more than 1 000 research papers before identifying 89 that assessed the outcomes of trophy hunting on nature or people in sub-Saharan Africa.
The resulting review, published in Conservation Letters, found that 65% of documented outcomes were positive for conservation and people’s well-being, compared with 26% that were negative and 9% that were ambiguous. The researchers describe it as the most comprehensive review of its kind to date.
Trophy hunting was one of Africa’s most contested conservation strategies, Clements said, with 23 sub-Saharan African countries permitting the practice amid mounting pressure in Europe and elsewhere in the Global North to ban imports of hunting trophies altogether.
Yet, she said, public debates about trophy hunting were often driven by ethics and assumptions rather than evidence.
“Trophy hunting tends to be talked about as either an unqualified good or an unqualified evil,” she said. “What our review shows is that the reality is far more context-specific and that context is something policymakers can act on.”
Explaining how the researchers, drawn from the universities of Stellenbosch, Florida, British Columbia and Helsinki, classified outcomes as positive, negative or ambiguous, Clements said studies had to measure hunting outcomes against a counterfactual or control.
“Just saying trophy hunting provided X many jobs or harvested Y many animals doesn’t tell us what would have happened to those people or animal populations in the absence of hunting,” she said.
The studies commonly compared hunting areas with non-hunting conservation areas, such as national parks or ecotourism areas, or examined outcomes before and after hunting was started or stopped.
“For each of these, we then evaluated the outcome of trophy hunting relative to the counterfactual to assess whether it was positive ... negative ... or ambiguous,” she said.
For example, an increase in jobs compared with a period when hunting was banned was classified as positive, while altered population sex ratios compared with a neighbouring national park were classified as negative. A study that could not determine whether a population decline was caused by legal trophy hunting or illegal poaching was classified as ambiguous.
“We weighted all variables and data points equally. But we also report these in disaggregated form, should people want to understand outcomes for example in a given country or for a given variable. We tried to be very transparent in the paper on how we classified outcomes and why.”
The review found that trophy hunting was associated with an increase in the amount of land under conservation in 92% of cases. Outcomes for income, employment and food security were positive in at least 85% of cases.
But the picture was more mixed for the animals being hunted.
“While populations of hunted species were more often stable or growing than declining, other measures such as age and sex ratios were more often negatively affected and impacts on animal movement were mixed,” the researchers said.
The researchers found a strong pattern around who held rights to land and wildlife and who received hunting revenues.
Outcomes were positive more than 80% of the time where communities or private landowners had rights to land and wildlife and received hunting revenue.
Clements stressed, however, that the study had not established that devolving those rights caused better outcomes.
“We didn’t test the causality of this relationship between land and wildlife rights and hunting outcomes in the paper, but the pattern was very striking — outcomes were far more often positive where these rights were devolved to local people.”
She cited South Africa as an example. “Private landowners in South Africa can own the wildlife on their land provided they hold a certificate of adequate enclosure (which proves it is theirs) and they can largely make their own decisions on how many animals to hunt, at what price and how to manage these populations and their habitats.
“And the evidence suggests that under such contexts, outcomes tend to be good for both conservation (with private wildlife ranches in South Africa conserving about 20% of the land area, where wildlife populations have recovered tenfold in the past half century) and people (as these ranches tend to employ more people, including more women and better paid jobs, than livestock farming — which is the most common alternative land use).”
Unlike Namibia and Botswana, however, trophy hunting largely takes place on private land, not community land, in South Africa.
“South Africa now has a big policy focus on growing the wildlife economy in ways that meaningfully include more landholding communities,” Clements said.
The review also highlighted significant gaps in the evidence. Clements said the review found that trophy hunting tended to increase the land managed for conservation, especially in the contexts where communities benefited.
“This is a key finding and yet there have been very few studies assessing the quality of that conserved land — how intact are the habitats and ecosystems? These are things we don’t necessarily even know for protected areas across the region and they are key knowledge gaps for understanding the effectiveness of different conservation mechanisms.”
Clements said non-economic aspects of local people's well-being were also poorly understood.
“Similarly, it is easier to count the number of jobs and the amount of money than to understand how a conservation mechanism like hunting affects local people's culture or their sense of place. These are also critical outcomes to understand.”
The researchers said the findings pointed to the importance of how wildlife-use systems were governed, including who held rights and responsibilities, who made decisions and who received the benefits.
“The important point is that outcomes depend on how hunting is governed and managed, rather than simply on whether hunting takes place.”
The findings come amid growing debate over trophy-hunting imports in Europe. France suspended imports of hunting trophies from endangered species in August 2026, while the UK’s Hunting Trophies Bill is before the House of Lords and animal welfare groups are campaigning for an EU-wide ban.
The researchers argued that a blanket ban could remove a source of revenue that, in some contexts, supports local people and creates incentives to conserve habitat and wildlife.
Instead, they proposed a standards-based approach in which importing countries require evidence that hunting contributes to conservation, local people receive an equitable share of revenues and quotas are science-based and adaptively managed.
“We need conservation agencies and funders to invest in the social-ecological monitoring of these systems, particularly in understudied regions,” said Clements.
“As African countries work towards ambitious conservation and development targets, understanding the conditions under which diverse conservation models, including trophy hunting, support both people and nature is essential for getting policy right.”