human elephant conflict essay

Human-elephant conflict: What it is and why it’s a major threat

The world’s largest land animal faces many threats, and so do the people who live alongside them. 

What is human-elephant conflict?   

“Human-elephant conflict” describes negative interactions between elephants and humans. The most common forms are crop raiding (when elephants eat or destroy crops), property destruction, or simply people getting too close to elephants and triggering defensive behaviours that may lead to injury or death of people and elephants.  

Although the term doesn’t usually include wildlife crimes like poaching and trafficking of elephants’ body parts, people who feel threatened by elephants may be more likely to ignore or take part in these crimes . 

These conflicts endanger not only people’s safety and elephants’ survival but also the health of ecosystems and the traditional lifestyles of rural communities . 

What are some causes of human-elephant conflict?  

People have coexisted with elephants for thousands of years, but boundaries, development activities, the climate, and natural resources are changing, putting pressure on us and them. 

Elephants are mega-herbivores that eat up to 150 kilograms of forage and drink up to 190 litres of water a day. They must navigate across large areas to find enough food and water to survive—but the land on which they depend is transforming due to growing human needs and a changing climate. 

Around 1.2 billion people worldwide live on less than USD$1.25 a day. Many live in elephant range countries —countries where elephants roam. As some of the world’s most marginalised people, they frequently find themselves competing with wildlife for land, food, water, and other natural resources; they are also often unaware of their own encroachment onto the habitat of elephants and other wildlife. 

Meanwhile, elephants increasingly find their home ranges fragmented by new villages, farms, cities, highways, or industrial growth such as mining. Barriers like fences and train tracks force them to travel longer distances and risk injury. The land where they once foraged is now home to human agriculture, and accessing watering holes increases their contact with villagers. 

As climate change raises temperatures and changes rainfall patterns, resources become even more scarce and elephants get pushed into new areas, including communal lands. Humans face their own challenges as they must move deeper into elephant territory to collect water or firewood. The competition becomes fierce and life-threatening—for people and wildlife.  

In some locations, however, successful conservation measures focused on law enforcement are seeing increasing populations of elephants, which require proper management. As elephants feel safer, they become less likely to confine themselves to areas with low human presence. 

How does human-elephant conflict harm elephants?   

All three remaining elephant species are on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species . The African forest elephant is critically endangered, and the African savannah elephant and Asian elephant are listed as endangered.  

Even more worryingly, all three have declining populations. 

Every year, Sri Lanka reports the deaths of around 200 elephants from human-elephant conflict situations , and in India around 100 elephants die annually from conflict with humans. Wildlife authorities in Kenya report having to kill up to 120 elephants a year because of conflicts with humans.  

The average female African elephant is 10–12 years old before she has her first baby , and Asian elephant females are slightly older. Because of their long generation time, it can take elephant families decades to recover from early deaths in the herd. And when adult females are killed, they often leave behind a calf who struggles to survive. Every elephant death drives the species closer to a point from which it can’t recover. 

The largest male elephants weigh up to 6,800 kilograms (15,000 pounds) . That makes them a hundred times heavier than many adult humans. When elephants feel threatened—or come across a barrier on their path toward food and water sources—they can injure or kill people and destroy homes and crops.  

In India, around 400 people a year die from conflict with elephants . In Kenya, around 200 people died in human-elephant conflicts between 2010 and 2017.  

Many people living in elephant range areas are already vulnerable in other ways. For example, they may be refugees who have fled their homes looking for safety or migrants seeking better living conditions, only to find themselves living in a core elephant habitat, putting their safety at risk . 

Beyond the tragic loss of life, elephants can cause tremendous damage to homes, community buildings (such as schools), and farmland. In India alone, around 500,000 families a year lost crops due to elephants , which threatens families’ fragile incomes as well as their health and nutrition. 

How is IFAW working to prevent human-elephant conflict?  

The causes of conflict are complex—and so are our solutions. We work with communities to transform conflict into coexistence. 

In Africa, our Room to Roam initiative gives elephants space to roam freely within scientifically identified key habitat and at a distance from people. Our goal is to secure and connect habitat within 12 critical landscapes in East and Southern Africa, where more than 330,000 elephants can roam freely by 2040. The result will be greater biodiversity, natural resilience to climate change, and a future where animals and human communities can coexist and thrive. 

At its core, Room to Roam centres on the understanding that community involvement is key to successful conservation. When communities get involved in natural resource management, ecosystems and incomes both become healthier. When families have reliable incomes and sustainable livelihoods, they become more resilient to financial shocks, such as having their crops raided. That’s why we partner with the communities that live alongside elephants to improve their livelihoods and increase their involvement in conservation. 

For example, in Amboseli, Kenya, we created Team Lioness , the first all-women ranger unit in East Africa. This team from the Maasai community is defying social norms and creating new opportunities for women. Our Jenga Mama project is also helping 60 women in the Amboseli community learn professions and set up microenterprises to generate sustainable incomes for their families and communities. In Zimbabwe, a Junior Ranger Programme implemented by ZimParks with our support educates preteens as conservation ambassadors in the communal lands bordering Hwange National Park. And to reduce deadly encounters with wildlife in Malawi, we built a pipeline that carries irrigation and household water from the Shire River to villages outside Liwonde National Park. 

In China, we launched the Asian Elephant Protection project in 2000, covering Xishuangbanna, Pu’er and Lincang, the three last remaining Asian elephant habitats in the Yunnan province. In Xishuangbanna, home to most of the approximately 300 remaining wild Asian elephants in China, we’ve trained community rangers to patrol villages and train communities in elephant safety. In the Pu’er region, we provided micro-credit loans to more than 210 households in seven villages, achieving an average annual income growth of 35% . We also launched the first-ever community-level early warning system in Yunnan, covering more than 60 villages in areas where elephants are active. 

In India, IFAW-WTI has been closely working with the local Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), the Assam Forest Department, fringe villagers, and local community-based organisations in the Greater Manas landscape of Assam, India. We gave support to more than 30 families of human-elephant conflict victims between 2009 and 2021. We jointly formed 28 Eco Development Committees (EDC) with the forest department and prepared micro plans with the EDC members, prioritising human-elephant conflict mitigation measures. We are providing livelihoods support to critically forest-dependent households to reduce their need to enter into the park for collection of fuelwood and other non-timber forest products. Additionally, we provided more than 100 families with new LPG connections as a source of clean energy for cooking.

From 2016 to 2021, IFAW-WTI played a key role in the entire process in upgrading 77,200 hectares of reserved forest areas to a protected areas network for better protection, ecological integrity, and a secured habitat for wildlife. The collaborative management approach involved local communities in the Greater Manas landscape. Implementation of various conservation programmes jointly with the Forest Department and BTC has helped secure a large habitat for Asian elephants in Assam to foster coexistence in a human-dominated landscape.

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Science | September 11, 2023

Inside the Effort to Prevent Conflict Between Humans and Elephants in Africa

Conservationists are inserting beehives as deterrents around farms and building craft breweries that reward farmers for pachyderm-friendly practices

Anthony Ham

Freelance writer

The armed men aren’t supposed to be here. We are several miles inside Buffalo Springs National Reserve in northern Kenya, and the driver I hired for this reporting project and I are checking out a rumor that the reserve’s elephants may have gone missing. Nearly 8,000 elephants have inhabited the broader Samburu-Laikipia ecosystem, which covers around 21,200 square miles. They should be easy to find, but the area is in the grip of drought, which has exacerbated simmering conflict among armed local communities fighting over livestock, grazing lands and limited water supplies. Some of these armed groups have moved into protected areas like Buffalo Springs, driving the elephants away, sometimes by shooting at them and sometimes because elephants often flee areas of high human activity. Instead of pachyderms, we find grazing cattle and herders with guns. They stop to watch us as we pass.

Back at the park gate, an itinerant trader warns us to be careful. “Not a week passes without something happening here,” says Daniel Lochilia. “People are being killed. Good luck in finding any elephants.”

With so many armed men and their cattle in the reserve, the elephants have likely fled to face an uncertain future in the human-dominated landscapes that lie beyond. The issue is indicative of the battle to save Kenya’s—and, more broadly, Africa’s—elephants, which has entered a new phase. A pachyderm decline that was once mostly fueled by poaching is now being driven by conflict between humans and elephants.

Elephants are notoriously difficult to count across such a wide area. But according to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature , as many as ten million elephants lived in Africa in 1930. Fifty years later, the figure is thought to have fallen to around 1.3 million elephants , although no one can be sure of the exact number. Now around 500,000 live on the continent, according to an expert with the nonprofit Save the Elephants, and savanna elephants such as those found in Kenya’s north are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as endangered. Smaller forest elephants, which the organization assessed as a separate species for the first time in 2021, are listed as critically endangered. From the mid 1980s, when poachers were killing an estimated 100,000 elephants for their ivory every year , until recent years , ivory poaching was the greatest threat to the species. With so many elephants being lost, scientists feared they could go extinct.

In 2013, the Elephant Crisis Fund (ECF) was launched to help combat the decline in elephants by reducing demand for ivory, stopping ivory poaching and fighting the trade in ivory. “It has been an immense success, because the Chinese government banned the domestic trade in ivory and was effective in maintaining that,” ECF director Chris Thouless says.

With demand suppressed, ivory trafficking has slowed to a trickle, and poaching has declined significantly. Thouless calls the results “a fragile success,” because poaching could return if anti-poaching programs are relaxed and demand for ivory spikes again in Asia.

But for now, human-elephant conflict is the main threat to the majestic creatures. When drought and ethnic conflicts drive people into protected areas, the displaced elephants do battle over water and food in the villages and farmlands that surround the reserves. In such confrontations, frightened elephants sometimes trample and kill people, and elephants are often shot and killed in retaliation for the deaths and other damage they cause. But conservationists are trying creative methods, using everything from bees to craft beer, to reduce the conflicts.

Population figures are being updated all the time, but later this year, experts will have a more exact measure of how savanna elephants are doing when results from a major southern African census conducted by governments, park authorities, conservation groups and scientists are released. But based on the preliminary findings, experts are cautiously optimistic about overall elephant numbers.

“Across the board, we’re seeing a small number of localized declines, but we’re not seeing major declines of large populations,” says Thouless. “I also don’t know of any populations which are in decline as a result of poaching for ivory. It’s a complete contrast to the situation ten years ago.”

In some elephant strongholds, the species is doing exceptionally well. An estimated 225,000 savanna elephants inhabit the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area—a patchwork of protected areas that spans parts of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This represents around half of all savanna elephants in Africa.

But not all elephant populations are prospering. Outside of those strongholds where elephant numbers are increasing or stable, “we’re seeing a gradual loss of elephants from whole countries as habitat loss and increased conflict take hold,” says Thouless.

In Kenya, which is home to an estimated 35,000 to 37,000 savanna elephants, porous borders have allowed guns and ammunition to move into the country from Somalia, Ethiopia and South Sudan. The weapons have fueled the ethnic conflicts that push people into protected areas. “Before, in the historical raids between communities, they used spears and pangas ,” says David Daballen, director of field operations for Save the Elephants . “Now they use AK-47s.”

The ready availability of guns has also made it easier for people to kill elephants, either because the elephants are rivals for scarce resources or because they threaten villagers’ safety.

Elephants can do a lot of damage. “During this latest drought, we even saw elephants going into the villages for the first time, raiding food in houses and knocking the houses over when people were actually inside at the time,” says Daballen.

And as the human population grows across Africa, developments block elephant corridors and occupy areas that were once the domain of wildlife. Just in Kenya’s northern Isiolo County, which includes Buffalo Springs, the human population has nearly tripled in just over two decades, from 100,000 in 1999 to almost 300,000 in 2023.

To help reduce conflict, conservationists and local communities are implementing several measures. Lucy King, the head of the human-elephant coexistence program with Save the Elephants, has compiled the “ Human-Elephant Coexistence Toolbox .” It brings together more than 80 different solutions, such as promoting elephant-proof ways for storing food and building walls around water sources.

One of the most popular conflict mitigation strategies involves bees. Their efficacy in keeping elephants at bay was identified almost by accident when a northern Kenyan farmer told conservationists that one of his trees wasn’t being damaged by elephants because it had a beehive in it.

“This is not a story of Westerners coming to Kenya and discovering this,” says King. “This came from traditional Africans working in the bush.”

To keep elephants out, conservationists funded local farmers to build beehive fences. This involves mounting wooden or plastic beehive boxes 4 or 5 feet off the ground every 65 feet or so with wires between them. Dummy hives in between the active hives prevent colonies from fighting with each other because, King says, African bees are much more aggressive when it comes to defending their hives than European or North American bees. It takes 12 beehives and 12 dummy hives to enclose an acre. If an elephant tries to push through the fence and disturb the hive, the bees attack. Any sting to the softer skin around the elephant’s eye, mouth or even the inside of the trunk can cause pain and swelling, prompting elephants to panic.

With this tactic, farmers not only better protect their crops but can also sell the honey, which provides an alternative source of income. Since the program’s inception, Save the Elephants has funded more than 650 beehives in southwestern Kenya alone, and communities in 23 African countries have adopted the program. Helping farmers protect their crops and develop alternative income streams with bees has also earned conservationists the trust of otherwise resistant farmers. This in turn makes possible conversations about other issues, including protecting elephant corridors.

But for all its successes, the beehive prevention method has limits. One area where the beehive solution hasn’t worked is northern Botswana, in an area of the Okavango Panhandle that is home to 20,000 humans and 18,000 elephants. There, the elephant population has doubled in the past 15 years. Unlike in Kenya, the local farmers have no tradition of beekeeping. And the dry winter climate makes it difficult for the bees to survive.

While the beehive solution is being retested, local nonprofit Ecoexist uses tools like chili fences and solar-electric lights to deter the pachyderms. “Elephant Express” school buses now ferry schoolchildren safely across the corridors they would otherwise have to cross on foot, dodging the giant creatures as they went. Ecoexist has also mapped the corridors, and local authorities now use these maps to reject planning permission for new buildings that would block the elephant pathways.

At the heart of Ecoexist’s approach is trying to help local farmers profit from living alongside elephants. To do this, the nonprofit helps formerly subsistence farmers increase their crop yields, thereby reducing the need to expand farms into the elephant’s world. They also buy the farmers’ surplus millet at double the market price, provided the farmers have protected their fields from elephants, practiced sustainable agriculture by rotating their crops and refused to expand their footprint into elephant corridors.

Because they only receive the favorable market rate if they keep their end of the bargain, says Ecoexist policy director Graham McCulloch, “it reinforces for farmers that there is this opportunity and this benefit, but only because they’re coexisting with elephants.”

Ecoexist expanded their approach beyond that of a traditional charity. A few years ago, it created a separate legal entity: the first licensed microbrewery in the city of Maun, Botswana—the Okavango Craft Brewery—where it uses the millet it purchases. “We wanted to create a market-linked incentive, not a subsidy,” says McCulloch.

Next up, the organization plans to reward local communities for their elephant-friendly practices by selling carbon credits on the global market. Also known as payments for ecosystem services, such credits enable international companies to buy into sustainable projects such as Ecoexist and the communities they work with as a way for the companies to offset their own carbon emissions. Such a move would ensure that the entire community, and not just those within the community who farm, benefits from living alongside elephants.

But McCulloch notes that living with elephants is difficult, and mitigating conflict is really hard work. “The more we chip away, the more we can build the tolerance level,” he says. “That’s what coexistence is all about.”

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Anthony Ham | READ MORE

Anthony Ham is an Australian writer whose work appears in  Smithsonian m agazine, the  New York Times  and elsewhere. He is the author of two books of narrative nonfiction,  The Last Lions of Africa  and  The Man Who Loved Pink Dolphins .

Human-Elephant Conflict and Coexistence in Asia

Loading... Original Research 03 August 2023 A case study on conflict intensity between humans and elephants at Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh Amir Hossen  and  Eivin Røskaft 2,619 views 2 citations

Loading... Original Research 24 May 2023 Elephants in the farm – changing temporal and seasonal patterns of human-elephant interactions in a forest-agriculture matrix in the Western Ghats, India N. R. Anoop ,  1 more  and  T. Ganesh 4,395 views 2 citations

Original Research 24 April 2023 Good, quarrelsome, bad: animal agency and human-elephant interactions in the Western Ghats, India Deepak Bhat Dundi ,  1 more  and  Garry Marvin 2,885 views 0 citations

Community Case Study 15 November 2022 Understanding barriers and benefits to adopting elephant coexistence practices in oil palm plantation landscapes in Lower Kinabatangan, Sabah Nurzhafarina Othman ,  2 more  and  Amielle DeWan 1,511 views 1 citations

Loading... Original Research 21 September 2022 Effectiveness of physical barriers in mitigating human–elephant negative interactions in North-East India Gitima Das ,  2 more  and  Govindan Veeraswami Gopi 4,002 views 3 citations

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Key Questions for Human-Elephant Conflict Research

By Gail Thomson, o riginally published in  Conservation Namibia

I am indebted to three elephant experts for their input into this article..

Human-elephant conflict: Managing elephants in a landscape that includes rural human communities is a major challenge in countries where elephant populations are increasing as a result of successful conservation measures. Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, in particular, must find ways to help their citizens living in rural areas to coexist with these great grey beasts that can be enchanting or terrifying, depending on your point of view.

In a previous  article  on the topic of elephants, hunting and coexistence with human communities, I pointed out that research findings on elephants must be balanced with the perspectives and needs of rural communities to make reasonable policies. Although the problems associated with human-elephant conflict were considered, we did not focus on addressing the conflict itself. In this article, we go a bit deeper into the role that research can play in managing human-elephant conflict. Namibia would benefit greatly from targeted research in this area that answers key questions for wildlife managers. If you are a student or researcher thinking about topics that can have real-world conservation outcomes, listen up.

First, let’s establish the difference between hunting elephants in order to reduce conflict with local communities and hunting to generate revenue and meat (the latter is called conservation hunting in Namibia, and trophy or sport hunting elsewhere). The  conservation hunting  concept is based on the principle that people living with elephants and other wildlife should benefit materially from their presence. Generating revenue and meat from elephants increases tolerance for the species and thus indirectly promotes human-elephant  coexistence . Conservancies in Namibia use the income from conservation hunting to employ over 600  community game guards  that assist with reporting conflict incidents and wildlife monitoring. At the national and conservancy level, conservation hunting income also contributes to the  Human-Wildlife Conflict Self-Reliance Scheme , thus playing an important general role in addressing conflict. Conservation hunting is not, however, the primary topic discussed here.

The main issue I want to address is how hunting directly affects human-elephant relations in the areas where it occurs. Elephant hunting includes what is known in Namibia as problem animal control hunts, whereby specific individuals that frequently cause damages are killed. In terms of elephant behaviour, population numbers and demographics, all forms of hunting are likely to affect human-elephant interactions in some way. Figuring out what that effect might be and how hunting can be managed to improve human-elephant relations in the long term is a promising area of research. It is my hope that some of the questions below may spark the interest of Namibian researchers to delve deeper into these issues.

Human-elephant coexistence may be an unrealistic goal in areas where farm infrastructure was built when no elephants were present and the farmers living there see no direct or indirect benefits from elephant presence. Where coexistence is not possible in the short- or medium-term, options other than the ones presented here may have to be  explored  – like translocation or, as a last resort, culling. The research questions presented here are specifically for areas where elephant presence generates enough benefits such that reducing the costs associated with them can lead to human-elephant coexistence.

1) What effect does hunting have on long-term elephant damage?

Problem animal hunts, particularly, are meant to reduce human-elephant conflict.  Research from Kenya  reveals that male elephants cause more conflict (either in groups or as singletons) than females, and that some males can be classed as habitual crop raiders, while others only raid occasionally. Furthermore, habitual raiders may teach younger males their same bad habits. Removing habitual raiders from the population therefore appears to be a sound course of action for reducing conflict, at least in the short term.

With a long-term view, however, removing habitual raiders may just make space for other males to fill their shoes, thus not addressing the  problem . Additionally, identifying habitual raiders is difficult, as many incidents happen at night and tracking a conflict-causing animal requires an extremely swift response to reports of damage that is not always possible. The question remains: if all else is equal (i.e. elephant and human density, habitat and agricultural practices), how does removing individual problem-causing elephants affect the long-term trend in human-elephant conflict? Conflict incidents and problem animal hunts are recorded in  Event Books  and through the hunting permit system, so this information can be used as a starting point for research in Namibia.

2) How does hunting influence elephant behaviour around people?

We already know that the total absence of older males leads to younger males becoming  unusually aggressive  to humans and other species. It is also possible that elephants that witness a hunt could become aggressive due to increased  stress levels , but solid evidence for this is lacking. On the other side of the coin, there is increasing research on using a  landscape of fear  to reduce conflict with humans by using the animals’ instinctive desire to avoid risk.

An animal’s landscape of fear is based on their life experience and lessons from their parents (or others in their social groups) that tell them which parts of their environment or times of day are more or less risky. This is very similar to the way we decide how to move around our cities based on crime levels that we have experienced or heard about through our social circles. Theoretically, at least, one could manipulate the elephants’ landscape of fear to reduce the number of individuals willing to approach a village or enter a crop field (risky spaces), while encouraging their use of wildlife corridors and protected areas as safe spaces in the landscape.

The research challenge is to figure out how hunting contributes to either exacerbating the problem through increased elephant aggression or reducing the problem by creating a landscape of fear. Detailed records of all elephant hunts (for any purpose), followed by behavioural studies of affected elephant groups and supported by Event Book data would help us to understand the link between hunting and elephant behaviour. This understanding can be used in turn to create hunting guidelines that will limit human-elephant conflict.

3) Can non-lethal methods ultimately replace problem animal control?

The two questions above reveal that there are some uncertainties regarding how hunting can be used to reduce human-elephant conflict in the long term. When these questions are answered, lethal control must be considered alongside the non-lethal options for reducing conflict. Protecting crops and water installations at conflict hotspots should reduce the need for lethal control over time. Non-lethal elephant deterrents (e.g. burning  chilli bombs  or applying  chilli oil  to fences) could be used alongside occasional hunts to maintain and reinforce the landscape of fear around villages and crops.

One of the key drawbacks of implementing long-term non-lethal control methods is the cost. Some options can be installed using  external funds , while others come at a cost to individual farmers (e.g. paying for diesel to pump water that elephants drink). In some cases, an external party makes the initial investment, but on-going maintenance is left to the farmer. By contrast, the meat of a hunted elephant is distributed among the affected people and the hunting fee may be used to offset losses incurred. Lethal control may therefore be a more attractive option for those who suffer the direct consequences of elephant damage and are expected to implement non-lethal methods (at least partially) at their own cost.

The effectiveness of non-lethal methods should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as lethal methods, particularly to determine its long-term effectiveness, cost and practicality in the field. A method that relies solely on investment of the farmer’s time and money is unlikely to win more support than bringing in a hunter to deal with a problem animal. For any given non-lethal control method introduced into a community, we need to know how well it worked over what period of time and whether or not the farmers feel that they could integrate the method into their day-to-day lives.

Understanding the researcher’s role

Experts in human-wildlife conflict know that this particular field of science is even more influenced by human factors (e.g. relationships) than other areas of science. Coexistence with elephants is like a giant puzzle that involves turning over many important pieces through research and experience. The pieces we focused on here include the direct links between hunting and human-elephant conflict, yet the indirect links can be just as important. These include political willpower, historical context, local culture and benefits derived from elephants. While research can provide some important puzzle pieces, it takes people from a diverse array of stakeholders to solve the puzzle itself.

Solving the puzzle of human-wildlife conflict requires trust, communication and a willingness to listen and learn. If research results are used to try and force people to adopt certain ideas or methods (even if they work), they are almost guaranteed to fail. Alternatively, research can be part of a collaborative learning process whereby everyone is involved in identifying the right questions, developing sound methods to test possible solutions and discussing the results. If you have been inspired by these research questions, remember to include others in your search for answers.

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Human-Elephant Conflict: A Review of Current Management Strategies and Future Directions

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Introduction Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations

• Published: October 2016
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This chapter considers the complex ways humans and elephants affect each other socially, historically, and ecologically. Concerned with interspecies coexistence in environments now so transformed by human agency as to warrant the designation of a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—it argues for a new approach to human–elephant relations that might help us rethink the contemporary challenges of conservation and welfare. This involves rejecting an intellectual tradition that has kept human histories separate from animal ecologies and, instead, embracing the multispecies turn, which recognizes the limiting conceit of sequestering the cultural human from the natural animal. It does so by proposing ‘ethnoelephantology’ as a shared discursive space and an integrated research programme that takes the relationship between humans and elephants as the unit of analysis, seeking to bring together approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The chapters in this volume represent a step towards such an approach to human–elephant relations.

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Human–elephant conflict in sri lanka: a critical review of causal explanations.

1. Introduction

2. theoretical considerations and methods, 3.1. colonial elephant hunting and capture.

“ Had the motive which incites to the destruction of the elephant in Africa and India prevailed in Ceylon, and had the elephants there been provided with tusks, they would long since have been annihilated for the sake of their ivory. ”

“ The opening of roads and the clearing of the mountain forests of Kandy for the cultivation of coffee, have forced the animals to retire to the low country; where again they have been followed by large parties of European sportsmen; and the Singhalese themselves, being more freely provided with arms than in former times, have assisted in swelling the annual slaughter. ”

3.2. Poaching

3.3. habitat loss and human and elephant population dynamics.

“ For a wide-ranging species like the elephant, this [loss of habitat available] means that the animal’s flexibility to buffer the effects of local resource depletion by moving elsewhere [sic.] is lost. Such a situation has led to an escalation of conflicts between man and elephant in Sri Lanka. ”

3.4. Elephant Crop-Raiding Behaviour and Socio-Economic Grievances

3.5. problem animals.

“ 12 elephants had died and 05 [sic.] of them had died of malnutrition and lack of sufficient foods. Further, another two elephants had died due to unattended translocation to the holding ground. It was observed that the health condition of the elephants retained at the holding ground remained at a poor level and no follow-up action had been taken on the health of these animals ”

3.6. Agricultural Modernisation and Failed Cohabitation

3.7. conservation and social justice, 4. discussion, 5. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Köpke, S.; Withanachchi, S.S.; Pathiranage, R.; Withanachchi, C.R.; Gamage, D.U.; Nissanka, T.S.; Warapitiya, C.C.; Nissanka, B.M.; Ranasinghe, N.N.; Senarathna, C.D.; et al. Human–Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka: A Critical Review of Causal Explanations. Sustainability 2021 , 13 , 8625. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158625

Köpke S, Withanachchi SS, Pathiranage R, Withanachchi CR, Gamage DU, Nissanka TS, Warapitiya CC, Nissanka BM, Ranasinghe NN, Senarathna CD, et al. Human–Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka: A Critical Review of Causal Explanations. Sustainability . 2021; 13(15):8625. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158625

Köpke, Sören, Sisira S. Withanachchi, Ruwan Pathiranage, Chandana R. Withanachchi, Deepika U. Gamage, Thushantha S. Nissanka, Chinthana C. Warapitiya, Banu M. Nissanka, Nirangani N. Ranasinghe, Chathurika D. Senarathna, and et al. 2021. "Human–Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka: A Critical Review of Causal Explanations" Sustainability 13, no. 15: 8625. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158625

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• Published: 20 May 2021

A pan-African spatial assessment of human conflicts with lions and elephants

• Enrico Di Minin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5562-318X 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• Rob Slotow   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9469-1508 3 , 4 ,
• Christoph Fink 1 , 2 ,
• Hans Bauer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5031-5842 5 &
• Craig Packer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3939-8162 3 , 6  

Nature Communications volume  12 , Article number:  2978 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Biogeography
• Conservation biology

African lions ( Panthera leo ) and African savanna ( Loxodonta africana ) and forest ( L. cyclotis ) elephants pose threats to people, crops, and livestock, and are themselves threatened with extinction. Here, we map these human-wildlife conflicts across Africa. Eighty-two percent of sites containing lions and elephants are adjacent to areas with considerable human pressure. Areas at severe risk of conflict (defined as high densities of humans, crops, and cattle) comprise 9% of the perimeter of these species’ ranges and are found in 18 countries hosting, respectively, ~ 74% and 41% of African lion and elephant populations. Although a variety of alternative conflict-mitigation strategies could be deployed, we focus on assessing the potential of high-quality mitigation fences. Our spatial and economic assessments suggest that investments in the construction and maintenance of strategically located mitigation fences would be a cost-effective strategy to support local communities, protect people from dangerous wildlife, and prevent further declines in lion and elephant populations.

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Introduction.

Current rates of species extinction are unprecedented 1 and are destined to increase without adequate conservation actions 2 . Large-bodied mammals have suffered significant population declines over the past century and are further threatened by continued habitat loss, unsustainable use, and human–wildlife conflict 3 . The transformation of natural habitat to agriculture and intensive livestock husbandry has not only contracted these species’ ranges and largely restricted their distribution to the confines of protected areas 4 , 5 , 6 , but the closer proximity of human activity to wildlife has also increased the dangers posed to people, livestock, and crops 7 . Human–wildlife conflict involves the tangible and/or perceived impacts of wildlife on people 8 , including human injury and death 9 , direct and indirect economic damage to crops, livestock, and property 10 , food insecurity 11 , and diminished psychological wellbeing 12 . Unmitigated conflict decreases local support for biodiversity conservation 13 and frequently escalates into retaliatory killing of wildlife 14 , 15 . Implementing effective human–wildlife conflict-mitigation strategies has, therefore, become a growing priority for engaging rural communities and preventing localized wildlife extinctions. Mitigation efforts can be broadly classified into tactics that directly or indirectly target wildlife (e.g., culling or translocating problem animals vs. noxious stimuli to deter crop-raiding elephants 16 , or improved livestock husbandry to reduce lion predation 17 ), whereas other approaches attempt to increase tolerance to economic losses inflicted by wildlife (e.g., compensation schemes 18 , performance–payment schemes, and increased benefits to local communities from wildlife-based tourism; see ref. 8 for a review), although the large-scale effectiveness of most of these efforts remains equivocal 8 , 19 , 20 .

Africa is one of the last global strongholds for the conservation of large carnivores and herbivores 5 , 7 . However, Africa’s human population is projected to grow from the current 1.2 billion people to nearly two billion by the end of the century 21 and Africa is also the centre of large-scale agricultural investments for the purposes of food and biofuel production 22 . Unsurprisingly, numerous parts of Africa have been identified as major hotspots of human pressure on biodiversity 23 , 24 and pressures will likely intensify further as a result of future pandemics, political instability, or armed conflicts that hinder wildlife-based tourism, reduce effective conservation funding, and undermine national economies 25 . The continent-wide conservation challenges of human–wildlife conflict are encapsulated by the iconic African lion and the African savanna and forest elephants (hereafter referred to as elephants), which have all experienced extensive range contractions 4 , 5 and suffered local extinctions and significant population declines throughout their ranges 26 , 27 , largely owing to (i) habitat loss 28 , (ii) unsustainable hunting 26 , 29 , (iii) retaliatory and preemptive killing to protect humans, livestock, and crops 8 , and (iv) extensive prey depletion (for lions) 30 .

Recent evidence suggests that African lion and elephant populations are persisting, or even increasing, in areas where conservation budgets are adequate and/or mitigation fences successfully prevent conflict with humans 19 , 27 , 31 , 32 . According to protected area managers, mitigation fences are essential along boundaries with the highest human, crop, and livestock densities, as alternative mitigation strategies are often ineffective 33 (but see ref. 20 on the lack of quantitative comparisons about the utility of the alternatives) and mitigation fences are currently found in at least ten African countries, despite the costs of attaining the necessary standards 19 , 33 . However, a number of conservationists have expressed opposition to fencing on the grounds that large-scale barriers have often disrupted wildlife movements and decreased landscape connectivity in the past, and that these impacts will be likely to intensify as species respond to climate change 34 . However, these concerns were largely inspired by the widespread deployment of veterinary fences in southern Africa, where barriers were erected to prevent disease transmission from wildlife to livestock with little regard for their ecological impacts on migratory wildlife species 35 . Thus, the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of fencing for both people and wildlife should turn its focus to identifying boundaries where fencing can be a financially sustainable strategy for preventing human–wildlife conflict, while minimizing any negative conservation impacts 36 .

Here we identify the areas that are most at risk for conflicts and estimate the associated return on investment of building and maintaining mitigation fences. Our analysis combines the most up-to-date information on the distribution of lions and elephants with spatial information on human population density, cropland, and cattle density, as these are considered to be the major drivers of human–wildlife conflict in Africa 4 , 8 . Conflict decreases with distance from protected areas 37 , 38 ; thus, we identify areas on the perimeter of the ranges of lions and elephants that are within 10 km of the highest densities of humans, cattle, and crops. To avoid interrupting ecological processes such as migrations and/or causing unintended consequences to other biodiversity (e.g., habitat fragmentation), we extended the species ranges to include adjacent protected areas that currently lack lions and elephants, but were once part of their historical distribution (Supplementary Fig.  1 ). We identify a set of socio-economic and political variables that affect lion and elephant populations in each area (Supplementary Table  1 ), consider whether proposed fence lines would affect other migratory mammals, and estimate the associated equivalent annual annuity (EAA; i.e., the constant annual cash flow potentially generated by fencing over its lifespan with the net present value (NPV) being calculated on an annualized basis 39 ), to determine the return on investment of building and subsequently maintaining the necessary mitigation fences at standards that can successfully restrict lions and elephants, and reduce cattle loss, crop damage, and human injury or death. It is noteworthy that our protocol identifies high human-occupancy areas that already block wildlife movements and otherwise disrupt large-scale ecosystem processes 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , so the erection of mitigation fences would mostly act to separate humans from dangerous wildlife, but we nevertheless examine whether such barriers would inflict substantial further ecological impacts. Also note that the economic analyses presented here refer to high-standard fences built along the perimeter of conservation areas that effectively restrict lions and elephants. Given that the associated construction costs for fencing are the highest of any mitigation strategy currently in use or being field tested, our analysis embeds these expenses into an economic framework and asks where such expenditures would be cost-effective. Supplementary Fig.  2 provides a flowchart of the analysis; full details are provided in the ‘Methods’. We find that 82% of all sites containing lions and elephants are adjacent to areas with considerable human pressure. Areas at severe risk of conflict (adjacent to high densities of humans + crops + cattle) comprise 9% of the perimeter of these species’ ranges. These worst affected areas are found in a total of 18 countries that respectively host ~74% and 41% of African lion and elephant populations. Although a variety of conflict-mitigation strategies could be deployed to address this issue, we show how mitigation fences would provide considerable return on investment via reduced cattle loss and crop damage, especially in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Attention should be paid to prevent further habitat fragmentation for migratory species traversing the worst affected areas.

Based on survey estimates, there are ~25,125 (±549) lions and 415,428 (±20,112) elephants left in Africa (Fig.  1 , Supplementary Fig.  3 , and Supplementary Table  2 ). Human population density is the most important factor predicting population numbers of both lions and elephants (Supplementary Fig.  4 and Supplementary Table  3 ): these species are most abundant at localities where human population density is lowest. At a national scale, lion populations are higher in countries with higher conservation expenditures and elephant numbers are higher in countries with higher gross domestic product per capita (Supplementary Fig.  4 and Supplementary Table  3 ).

Lion ranges are in orange, whereas elephant ranges are in turquoise. Areas hatched in orange and turquoise represent overlapping species ranges. Each animal icon is equivalent to 1000 individuals. Values in parenthesis refer to 95% confidence intervals. Silhouette for lion is in the public domain and available from phylopic.org and silhouette for elephant is free for personal and commercial purpose from www.flaticon.com .

Overall, 82% of all sites (i.e., protected and other conservation areas) containing lions and elephants in Africa are adjacent to areas with substantial human pressures (Fig.  2 ). About 60% of the perimeter of these ranges is adjacent to areas with high densities of human population, crops, or cattle (Table  1 ). Nine percent of the perimeter (totalling about 10,000–12,000 km) is at severe risk of conflict because of the co-occurrence of all three human pressures and these areas are distributed across 18 different countries (Fig.  2 and Table  1 ). These 18 countries are also among the most important for lion and elephant conservation, hosting ~74% and 41% of the entire lion and elephant populations, respectively. Another 10% of the perimeter, distributed across 26 countries, is at high risk of conflict, as they contain areas facing high human population density plus either high crop density for elephants or high cattle density for lions (Fig.  2 ). Countries with severe and high risks of conflict host 95% of Africa’s lions and 66% of Africa’s elephants.

A Areas at risk of conflict across all of Africa. Extended range of elephants and lions are in dark grey. Definitions of severe, high, moderate, and low risk of conflict are given in the legend to Table  1 . B Areas at risk of conflict in East Africa. C Human population density, D cattle density, and E proportion of cropland maps. See handling of uncertainty over spatial mapping in Supplementary Figs.  5 and 6 .

Sensitivity analyses confirmed the same countries with areas at severe risk regardless of the buffer distances used in the spatial analyses (Supplementary Fig.  5 and Supplementary Table  4 ), and the locations of severe- and high-risk areas of conflict are robust to randomly varying the distances between the species-range perimeter and the human pressure maps (Supplementary Fig.  6 and Supplementary Table  5 ). It is noteworthy that the presence of lions and elephants is more certain in the areas identified as being at severe risk of conflict (Supplementary Fig.  7 ). In addition, mitigation fences in the severe conflict areas would not increase habitat fragmentation for most of the associated migratory mammals (with the exception of a slight increase of fragmentation for Grévy’s zebra Equus grevyi and Thomson’s gazelle Eudorcas thomsonii ) (see Supplementary Table  6 ). Furthermore, it is worth noting that most countries with severe and high risk of conflict are also likely to experience the highest human population growth by 2100 (Supplementary Table  7 ).

Although the construction and maintenance costs of mitigation fences at such a large scale might seem prohibitively expensive, elephants and lions inflict considerable damages to crops and livestock in many parts of Africa 8 , 19 , 44 , 45 . Installing and maintaining mitigation fences would likely provide a net return on investment in all 18 countries with areas at severe risk of conflict with the exception of South Sudan (Fig.  3 ), with Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya being the countries where investments in mitigation fences around such areas would be most cost-effective in terms of reducing cattle loss and crop damage (Fig.  3 and Supplementary Fig.  8 ). In contrast, installing and maintaining mitigation fences in high conflict-risk areas would seldom generate sufficient return on investment and, therefore, other mitigation strategies would be preferred (Supplementary Fig.  9 ). When considering per capita benefits, installing and maintaining mitigation fences around severe conflict areas could potentially provide the highest return on investment for local people living in Benin, South Africa, and Zambia (Supplementary Table  8 ).

Whiskers represent range from minimum to maximum, box indicates 25 and 75 percentile, and horizontal line represents median. Plotted dots represent 100 EAA values calculated by varying all economic model parameters randomly across ±10% of the values of each parameter. Dots outside the whisker boundaries are outliers. Calculations do not consider the additional benefit of reducing costs of human injury or death.

Our results show that lions are at greater risk of conflict with humans than are elephants. Without adequately funded conservation actions, there are likely to be serious future risks of population declines or local extinctions that will affect 74% of the entire lion population. Elephants, on the other hand, still occur in relatively high numbers in low human-occupancy areas 46 . However, Africa’s projected human population growth will almost certainly spread the severe conflict risks to include areas currently classified as only high risk, and population declines or local extinctions of lions and elephants will ultimately affect national economies in countries that depend heavily upon revenue generated from wildlife-based tourism and sustainable utilization 47 , 48 .

Our results also highlight that, in countries with areas at severe risk of conflict, mitigation fences are an economically sustainable strategy that can potentially be used to help reduce human–wildlife conflict at large scales. Building such fences in severe-risk conflict areas could provide an economically viable action to reduce crop damage and livestock losses; reductions in crop damage and cattle loss could, in turn, enhance tolerance for lions and elephants 8 . By contrast, our results suggest that the return on investment from expensive fencing strategies might not repay themselves in countries with lower levels of human–wildlife conflict. In these cases, alternative strategies, e.g., those that rely on human-dimension approaches to enhance co-existence 8 between humans and wildlife, would potentially be a more cost-efficient solution to mitigating conflict, assuming they can be both effective and sustainable in perpetuity. It is noteworthy, though, that our analysis only considers the direct economic benefits of fencing but does not take into consideration benefits from preventing human deaths or injuries, or mitigating less tangible psychological effects, fears and anxieties that cannot easily be monetized 49 , all of which would be reduced by fencing even in moderately affected areas. On the other hand, our analysis neglects the economic costs imposed on local people by mitigation fences (e.g., restrictions on access to protected areas), although these could be minimized through permit systems and strategically placed access points.

Although large-scale agriculture and high-density human settlements often disrupt animal movements as effectively as mitigation fences 41 , 42 , 43 , attention should clearly be paid to risks of more completely interrupting ecological processes such as mammalian migrations (see ref. 50 ). Our results highlight the potential for Grévy’s zebra and Thomson’s gazelle to be affected by building mitigation fences in the severe-risk areas without safeguards to prevent blockage of migration corridors. Indeed, fine-scale studies of animal movements from collared animals should ideally be employed to prevent placing fences in areas that would obstruct such migrations 51 . Future studies should also assess how mitigation fences would affect other taxonomic groups, such as invertebrates and plants, and ecological processes (e.g., seed dispersal) 34 , 52 , 53 , and investigate the measures that could reduce any local impacts.

Interestingly, several areas of lion and elephant habitat in South Africa are under relatively low risk of conflict with humans compared to other parts of Africa. Thus, the country that first utilized fencing for conservation has the potential to re-open some of its wildlife areas to restore large-scale ecosystem processes, continuing a pattern started in 1993 when fences along the western boundary of Kruger National Park were dropped to annex 1800 km 2 of wildlife habitat in the associated private nature reserves. Furthermore, extensive mammalian migrations could potentially be restored by removing veterinary fences in Botswana and Namibia, which were erected in the 1970s to reduce disease transmission from wildlife to livestock (e.g., in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area). We emphasize that any decision to erect a mitigation fence should be premised on reducing human–wildlife conflict rather than arbitrarily restraining natural movements of animals across extensive landscapes; existing fences should also be interrogated for their purpose and function, as well as their unintended consequences on biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

As with any large-scale spatial analysis, data quality should be taken into consideration. First, our species-range maps represent coarse-resolution distributional boundaries rather than fine-resolution edges of suitable habitat. However, we were partly able to address this issue by using population sizes of lions and elephants within each area. Second, the financial costs of conflict mitigation are likely to vary geographically based on physical and socio-economic factors. We used the most up-to-date fencing costs wherever possible throughout sub-Saharan Africa 33 , but this information is not available in countries where mitigation fences do not yet exist. Our calculation of the EAA of fencing utilized a variety of country-specific information of market prices, crop yields, etc., but our approach assumes that the financial benefits will be returned to local stakeholders and not to the donors/agencies who would invest in fence construction in the first place. Third, our results should only be viewed as a continent-wide assessment rather than as a precise blueprint for implementing local-scale mitigations. The latter would require on-the-ground validation and adaptation to local circumstances, especially where species ranges extend beyond protected area boundaries and into community land; local-level consultations would be essential for promoting acceptance and support for these strategies rather than risking additional disputes between wildlife managers and local communities (Supplementary Fig.  7 ).

We consider this study as foundational for informing future work that could holistically integrate human dimensions of human–wildlife conflict by inspiring collaborations with local communities to explore their willingness to accept or reject hard strategies such as mitigation fences 8 , 54 . The intention of a mitigation strategy such as fencing should not be to completely exclude people from access to parks but should be negotiated by collective agreements. For example, access gates could facilitate access of local communities to water and other natural resources, as well as for various cultural purposes 55 . Areas with effective land-sharing and pre-existing community benefits from wildlife 56 , 57 could use potential fence lines as metaphorical tools for discussion and negotiations among stakeholders. A central goal of conflict mitigation is to prevent lion and elephant attacks 37 ; reducing these threats would not only enhance human wellbeing in terms of lives saved but also improve mental health (sensu 12 ). For example, conflict with elephants in Botswana raised concerns in local people as to food security, safety, and mobility 58 . Additional costs, such as time expenditures on crop protection or livestock guarding, and risks of infectious diseases 12 could also be reduced.

In conclusion, we stress the importance of immediate action to minimize current and future human–wildlife conflict in Africa. Areas of intensive human pressure already produce hard boundaries around remaining areas of natural habitat, thus reliance on strategies such as mitigation fencing would merely reflect the reality of conserving large, dangerous wildlife species in human-dominated landscapes. Effective conflict mitigation could potentially motivate improved conservation of elephants and lions, while retaining the socio-economic benefits that flow from intact wildlife systems that still host substantial numbers of lions and elephants. The need for substantial investments has never been more urgent, as the coronavirus disease 2019 crisis has drastically reduced the benefits of wildlife-based tourism in some regions 25 , 59 , likely increasing costs of living with lions and elephants, and exacerbating conflict with humans. Our pan-African spatial assessment of human–wildlife conflict provides an important starting point for informing future research and conservation planning at finer geographical scales.

After preprocessing the data, methods consisted of spatial analyses to map areas at risk of conflict; statistical analyses to identify the most important factors affecting lion and elephant population numbers; economic analyses to estimate the EAA of building and maintaining mitigation fences in areas under severe and high risk of conflict, and fragmentation analyses to assess the impact of fences on migratory mammal species. We describe each step in detail below (see Supplementary Fig.  2 for a flowchart of the analysis). All spatial data were converted to vectors for analysis to reduce commission errors (when a species is mistakenly thought to be present) when converting the species-range maps from vector to raster. Data preprocessing was carried out using the open source database PostgreSQL 11.4 ( https://www.postgresql.org/about/ ) with the GIS extensions of PostGIS 2.5 ( https://postgis.net/ ); conflict mapping and range fragmentation analyses used PostgreSQL 11.4 and PostGIS 2.5, and Python v. 3.7.0 60 ; statistical and economic analyses used R v. 3.6.0 61 ; sensitivity analyses used PostgreSQL 11.4 and PostGIS 2.5, and Python v. 3.7.0 60 and R v. 3.6.0 61 .

Preprocessing

Human pressures.

Human pressure layers were independently generated from this study. We used Gridded Population of the World Version 4 (GPWv4) as a layer for human population density 62 . GPWv4 is a minimally modelled data set consisting of estimates of human population (number of persons per raster grid cell) based on non-spatial population data (i.e., tabular counts of population listed by administrative area) and spatially explicit administrative boundary data. Population input data are collected at the most detailed spatial resolution available from the results of the 2010 round of Population and Housing Censuses. The input data are then extrapolated to 2020 using calculated growth rates to produce future population estimates. A proportional allocation gridding algorithm, utilizing ~13.5 million national and subnational administrative units, assigned population counts to 30 arcsecond (~1 km at the equator) grid cells. The population density rasters were created by dividing the population count raster for a given target year by the land-area raster.

We used the most recent version of the Gridded Livestock of the World database 63 , reflecting the compiled and harmonized subnational livestock distribution data for 2010, to extract information on cattle density. The data set provides global population densities of cattle, buffaloes, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and ducks in each land pixel at a spatial resolution of 0.083333 decimal degrees (~10 km at the equator). Detailed livestock census statistics are mined from agricultural yearbooks or through direct contacts with ministries or statistical bureaus. The census statistics are usually found in the form of numbers per administrative unit that must be linked to corresponding geographic information system boundaries. Densities are estimated in each census polygon by dividing the number of animals from the census by the surface area of the administrative unit polygon (estimated in an Albert equal-area projection), corrected by a mask excluding unsuitable areas. Livestock densities were then extracted from the subnational census data and were used as the dependent variable in Random Forest models to estimate a density value in each pixel, based on raster predictor variables.

We used spatially detailed crop maps available from the Copernicus Global Land Cover map at ~0.001° (~100 m) resolution 64 . The land-cover map is a discrete map with ten continuous cover fractions (nine base land-cover classes and seasonal water) to provide spatial information about land for a diversity of applications, including biodiversity conservation. Cropland (as percentage of 100 m pixel that is covered by cropland) refers to cultivated and managed agriculture, but does not include perennial woody crops that are classified under the appropriate forest or shrub land-cover type 64 . Cropland also refers to both irrigated and rainfed agriculture. The land-cover map was generated by compiling the 5-daily PROBA-V multi-spectral image data with a Ground Sampling Distance of ~0.001° as the primary earth observation data and PROBA-V UTM daily multi-spectral image data with a Ground Sampling Distance of ~0.003° (~300 m) as the secondary earth observation data. Next, the 5-daily PROBA-V 100 m and daily 300 m datasets were fused using a Kalman filtering approach. The global overall accuracy of the product for the base year 2015 was calculated through an independent pre-validation and reached 80%.

Species-range maps

Updated range maps showing current distribution for lions and elephants were provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Cat and African Elephant Specialist Groups 65 . In addition to the range maps, the specialist groups provided information on the number of African lions (2018) and elephants (2016) within sites where they are still extant. We also obtained species-range maps for all terrestrial mammal species in orders Cetartiodactyla, Perissodactyla, Primates, and Carnivora occurring in Africa from the IUCN Red List portal ( www.iucnredlist.org/ ). Mammal species in these orders include migratory mammal species (e.g., the common wildebeest Connochaetes taurinus ), which might be negatively affected by mitigation fences, e.g., by potentially blocking migratory routes.

Protected areas

The data on protected areas were based on the May 2019 release of the World Database on Protected Areas 66 (retrieved from http://www.protectedplanet.net ). To prevent overestimation of the area coverage of protected areas caused by overlapping designations, we merged polygons into a single layer. We only included in the analysis IUCN categories Ia (Strict Nature Reserve), Ib (Wilderness Area), II (National Park), III (Natural Monument or Feature), and IV (Habitat/Species Management Area), because we wanted to prevent fences from excluding people from protected areas that had been modified by the interaction of nature and people over time (e.g., V, Protected Landscape/Seascape).

Mapping potential risk of conflict

A database on the spatial distribution of conflict locations between humans and lions and elephants is not available across Africa. We therefore mapped the most prominent factors known to affect conflict: human population density (for both lion and elephant), crop raiding (elephants), and cattle killing (lions) 8 . Furthermore, spatial modelling of range contractions in carnivores showed that contractions were significantly more likely in regions with high rural human population density, cattle density, and/or cropland 4 . Therefore, we only retained areas where human, cattle, and crop densities were in the first decile (in our case, the first decile is the decile with the highest human population, crop, and cattle densities) by PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Using only the highest decile likely resulted in a conservative map of spatial conflict.

We further classified areas at the highest potential conflict into low, moderate, high, or severe risk of conflict. Specifically, areas at severe risk of conflict are those where the highest human population, crop, and cattle densities all overlap; areas at high risk of conflict are those with overlaps between the highest densities of human population and either crops or cattle; areas at moderate risk of conflict are the areas where the highest crop and cattle densities overlap; and areas at low risk of conflict are those with only one human pressure, i.e., the highest human population, or crop, or cattle density. The remainder was considered as being at no risk of conflict, as it did not meet any of the above criteria, but note the conservative nature of our analysis (see above).

The lion and elephant range maps and the protected area layer were intersected to select all protected areas that contain parts of lion and elephant range and/or were adjacent to the species-range maps. The identified protected areas were then merged with the species-range maps to create a new extended range layer (see for an example in Supplementary Fig.  1 ). These extended range maps were used (i) to identify potential areas where lions and elephants could be restored, and (ii) to avoid interrupting ecological processes (e.g., migrations) and/or causing unintended consequences (e.g., fragment populations) to other biodiversity in neighbouring protected areas.

We then identified areas at risk of conflict by intersecting the extended range map layer for lions and elephants with the classified conflict map. In all cases, the intersections were carried out so that the classified conflict areas were either adjacent to, or within a distance of 10 km from, the edge of the extended range map layer. We set this distance to consider the wide-ranging behaviour of both lions and elephants, to account for the fact that conflict decreases at greater distances from protected area boundaries 37 , 38 , and to account for the fact that future human pressures will likely increase before conservation actions take place 2 .

We assessed how robust our results were to commission (where human pressure is mistakenly assumed to exist) and omission (where human pressure is mistakenly assumed to be absent) errors in the human pressure maps by carrying out a sensitivity analysis that randomly varied the distances between the extended range maps and the human pressure maps. We first used Latin hypercube sampling, which is a form of sampling used to reduce the number of runs necessary for a Monte Carlo simulation to achieve a reasonably accurate random distribution 67 , to randomly vary 100 times the distance values between the extended range and human pressure maps. Specifically, we divided the low, moderate, high, and severe conflict lines into 100 m segments, calculated the minimum distance for each segment to human pressure within a 10, 20, and 30 km buffer distance from the edge of the extended range map layer, and then randomly varied that distance 100 times across ±10% of the value. We then averaged the resulting 100 randomly created distance values for each segment and identified which segments fell outside of the analyzed buffer distances of 10, 20, and 30 km. We tested for 20 and 30 km buffer distances, as we wanted to assess the variability of the fencing distance to different buffer sizes. We also estimated the certainty of lion and elephant presence by identifying segments of the perimeter of the range maps of lion and elephant that overlapped with protected areas. We did this as we had information on certain presence of both species from within protected areas, as opposed to areas extending outside of protected areas.

Statistical analyses

We used an information theoretic approach 68 and Bayesian information criterion to calculate statistical models. We used generalized linear mixed models with a negative‐binomial error distribution to account for over-dispersed count data and a log‐link function to examine factors affecting lion ( n  = 77) and elephant ( n  = 191) population sizes in Africa. Generalized linear mixed models were fitted with both random and fixed effects, to capture the data structure. Country was included as a random intercept to represent the hierarchical structure of the data. All variables listed in Supplementary Table  8 were fitted as fixed effects, i.e., with constant regression coefficients across countries. The site-specific variables were calculated only for sites where lions and elephants are currently present and not for the extended ranges. For transboundary sites that stretch across countries, we used the value for Gross Domestic Product, Conservation expenditure, and the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, for the country making the largest area contribution to the site. We compared and ranked models using the Bayesian information criterion 68 . To avoid multicollinearity among variables, we only selected variables with the strongest effect on population numbers that correlated at r  < 0.7. Therefore, only one member of each pair that had a correlation >0.7 was selected as an input into the modelling process. We assessed each model’s relative probability, using Bayesian information criterion weights and the structural goodness-of-fit from the percentage of deviance explained by the model. We determined the magnitude and direction of the coefficients for the independent variables with multi-model averaging implemented in the R package glmulti 69 . The relative importance of each predictor variable was measured as the sum of the weights over the six top‐ranked models with Bayesian information criterion values closer to that of the best model containing the parameter of interest. Finally, we used a 10-fold cross-validation (a bootstrap resampling procedure using 1000 iterations) to assess the predictive ability of the top-ranked model.

Range fragmentation analyses

We assessed how the proposed mitigation fences affected species-range connectivity by calculating the perimeter length-to-area ratio for mammal species in orders Cetartiodactyla, Perissodactyla, Primates, and Carnivora, whose ranges were identified as intersecting with areas at severe risk of conflict. Minimizing the perimeter length-to-area ratio is an important method of optimizing protected area design, resulting in compact reserves with high connectivity that can enhance persistence of the species. The smaller the ratio, the greater the clumping and connectivity of the species ranges. Specifically, we calculated the ratios of perimeter length to area for the ranges of 20 migratory mammalian species (i) under current conditions without fences and (ii) under future conditions where the identified mitigation fences would pass through their ranges. In the latter case, we used a 20 m buffer around the identified fences to account for further habitat clearance due to maintaining clearances around the fences for management purposes.

Economic analyses

We used EAA to estimate the return on investment of building and maintaining mitigation fences to reduce cattle loss and crop damage. EAA calculates the constant annual cash flow generated by a project over its lifespan if it were an annuity and the annuity can then be compared to other projects of similar or different lifespan. Therefore, the measure potentially provides an important means for funders/donors to compare different investment opportunities. EAA is calculated by dividing the NPV of a project by the present value of annuity factor 39 . We started by calculating NPV in countries with areas at severe and high risk of conflict as:

where \({R}_{i}\) is net cash flow, \(d\) is the discount rate specific to each country (Supplementary Table  9 ), n is the number of time periods, \(i\) is the cash flow period, and \(Z\) is the initial investment of building the fences. NPV was calculated over a 10-year investment period. \({R}_{i}\) was calculated as:

where \(B\) is the economic benefit derived from mitigation fences and \(C\) is the cost of maintaining mitigation fences. The economic benefits of mitigation fences for countries with severe risk of conflict refer to the potential reduction in cattle loss (for lions) and crop damage (for elephants) derived from building fences:

where \(L\) represents the economic benefits of reducing cattle loss and \(E\) measures the economic benefits of reducing crop damage. For countries with high risk of conflict, the benefit ( \(B\) ) is derived from one or the other, i.e., \(B\)  =  \(L\) or \(B\)  =  \(E\) .

where \(v\) is the number of cattle that are not lost because of the presence of fences, \(w\) is the average weight in kg of adult cattle in that country, and \(P\) is the price of meat per kg paid to producers in that country in 2017 (data can be downloaded from http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/PP ). \(v\) was calculated as the percentage of total cattle present in the 10 km buffer adjacent to severe and high conflict areas, which could potentially be killed, based on published estimates across Africa 45 . Estimates range from 0.8 to 2.6% of cattle losses, and we decided to use a conservative 1% loss in the analysis (see below for how we accounted for uncertainty in model parameters). \(w\) was based on the average weight of an adult cow with estimates available at a regional level (west Africa: 262 kg; central Africa: 281 kg; east Africa: 283 kg; and southern Africa: 339 kg) 70 .

where \(d\) is the percentage of crop area damaged by elephants; data are taken from published estimates (ranging from 0.2 to 4% and we used a conservative 1% in the analysis) 44 ; \(A\) is the total area in km 2 available as crops in the 10 km buffer adjacent to the areas at severe and high risk of conflict; \(y\) is the yield (ton/km 2 ) for the crop known to be targeted by elephants (cassava, maize, millet, banana, sorghum, groundnuts) 44 , which covered the largest area size in that country in 2017 (data calculated from: http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/PP ); and \(P\) is the price per ton paid to producers for that crop in that country in 2017 (data can be downloaded from http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/PP ). Although there might be several crops available within the buffer, this information is currently not available at the continental scale. Therefore, we decided to use the most common cultivated crop known to be targeted by elephants in each country.

The cost of maintaining mitigation fences ( \(C\) ) was calculated as:

where f is the fence length in that country and \(c\) is the cost for maintaining the fence. We obtained cost estimates of building ( Z ) and maintaining \((c)\) the fences from Pekor et al. 33 . We used the median estimated current cost of USD 9522 per km for building fences and the median stated annual budget cost of USD 487 per km for adequate fence inspection and maintenance. This is the most up-to-date information validated through peer review on the costs (converted to 2017 USD) across Africa 33 . Cost estimates varied across surveyed conservation areas because of fence height and materials but included relevant costs of electrification and predator-proof structures 33 . The data were collected from 29 partially fenced (<90% of perimeter fenced) and 34 fully fenced (≥90% of perimeter fenced) protected areas, including, e.g., Kruger National Park in South Africa, across sub-Saharan Africa 33 .

Finally, we calculated EAA for each country as:

We used Latin hypercube sampling to vary all model parameters mentioned above randomly from within 100 partitions across ±10% of the values of each parameter and assess the uncertainty associated with model estimates on EAA. The partitioning across ±10% of the values of each parameter was deemed suitable to account for uncertainty over model parameters that were lacking estimates of variance. The resulting 100 EAA values for each country are shown in Fig.  3 and Supplementary Figs.  8 and 9 .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

Information on the distribution and population sizes of lion and elephant are available from the IUCN Cat and African Elephant Specialist Groups. The study used openly available datasets of Gridded Population of the World Version 4, Gridded Livestock of the World database, and crop maps available from the Copernicus Global Land Cover map with references provided in the ‘Methods’ section. Range maps for all terrestrial mammal species used in the fragmentation analyses are available from the IUCN Red List portal ( www.iucnredlist.org/ ). The data on protected areas were available from the World Database on Protected Areas ( http://www.protectedplanet.net ). Data for the economic analyses are openly available from sources such as FAO and links are provided in the ‘Methods’ section. Our conflict-risk maps are available to download from https://etsin.fairdata.fi/dataset/d0ac647a-4d73-4117-89de-9d194215f948 .

Code availability

Code used for creating the conflict-risk maps is available at https://gitlab.com/helics-lab/spatial-analysis-human-wildlife-conflict .

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Acknowledgements

We thank the IUCN Cat and African Elephant Specialist Groups for kindly providing information on distribution and population sizes of lion and elephant. E.D.M. and C.F. thank the European Research Council (ERC) for funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement #802933).

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E.D.M., R.S. and C.P. conceived the study. E.D.M. and C.F. compiled the datasets, carried out data preprocessing, analyzed the data, and prepared figures and tables. E.D.M. led the writing of the original draft with contributions from R.S. and C.P. E.D.M., R.S., C.F., H.B. and C.P. contributed to writing, reviewing, and editing the manuscript.

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Di Minin, E., Slotow, R., Fink, C. et al. A pan-African spatial assessment of human conflicts with lions and elephants. Nat Commun 12 , 2978 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23283-w

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Status of Asian elephant and Human-elephant conflict (HEC) in Asia: A brief and updated review

Montez, D. and Leng, A., 2021. Status of Asian elephant and Human-elephant conflict (HEC) in Asia: A brief and updated review. Journal of Nature and Applied Research, 1(1), pp.28-35.

8 Pages Posted: 5 Oct 2021

Duarte Montez

Deep Eco Conservation Foundation

Date Written: September 1, 2021

The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), the only extant species of the genus Elephas which belongs to family Elephantidae of order Proboscidea is currently restricted to 13 countries in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia (Sukumar, 2006). The range of Asian elephant does not extend beyond India to the west and Borneo to the east. However, this species once roamed an extended range from western Asia to the east as far as the Yangtze River in China (Olivier, 1978; Sukumar, 2006). The Asian elephant has disappeared from 95% of its historical range and currently distributed in discontinuous populations (Sukumar, 2006). The largest population of Asian elephants is found in the mainland of India (24,000-33,000) followed by considerable populations in Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia (>1000). Small populations can be observed in Bhutan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Vietnam and China (<1000) (Sukumar, 2006). According to Menon and Tiwari (2019) the current total population of Asian elephants in the world is c. 48,323–51,680 in the wild and c. 15,000 in captivity which spreads over an area of 486,800 km2. These figures give us a crude estimate of the population density of the species; ~0.10 individuals/km2 or 10 individuals per 100 km2. Given the body size of the Asian elephant, being the second largest terrestrial species of the world, this estimated density is considerably high and provides an indication how diminished and fragmented the populations are. Asia is also the most populated region of the world when human population is considered. Therefore, the obvious competition between the humans and elephants for the resources and habitats continues from the past to the present giving rise to the human-elephant conflict (HEC). With numerous threats mainly induced by habitat loss/fragmentation, poaching and HEC, the Asian elephant population has significantly declined by at least 50 percent over a period of less than 100 years (Sukumar, 1992). Therefore, E. maximus has been categorized as an endangered (EN) species (IUCN, 2021). This paper aims to briefly review the current status of Asian elephant and HEC in the present range of the species within different parts of Asia.

Keywords: Elephas maximus, elephant conservation, wildlife conflict, wildlife management, resource use

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Human-elephant conflict hotspots in Assam: a rapid appraisal method

• Original Research
• Published: 02 May 2024
• Volume 33 , pages 2231–2245, ( 2024 )

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• Nazimur Rahman Talukdar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0667-460X 1 ,
• Parthankar Choudhury   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9485-8854 1 &
• Firoz Ahmad   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2243-8698 2  

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In India, human-elephant conflict has been on the rise for the last few decades. The situation is worse in the state of Assam, where 5719 elephants are present, and the density of elephants is greater than that of other areas. Most of the elephant habitats in the state are fragmented or intermingled with human-used lands. As a result, human-elephant conflict (HEC) has been increasing in the state. Each year, an average of 80 elephants and 70 humans die in the state because of HEC. Most of these conflicts occur during the paddy harvesting season. At that time of year, the elephants come out from their habitats and take refuge in forest patches and tea gardens near agricultural fields and raid crops at night. Different methods have been adopted to identify conflict-affected areas, but none of the studies have tried to identify all the HEC-affected areas in the state. Here, we provide a rapid appraisal approach for identifying HEC hotspots in the state by using published news information as the primary source of data. A total of 216 villages were identified as HEC-affected areas in Assam. The identified areas can be used to understand site-specific problems and for HEC mitigation practices, as these areas are currently limited to only a few areas.

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NRT and PC conceptualised the idea, formulated the method and conducted the study. FA prepared the Figs.  1 and 3 . All the authors contributed in drafting and final approval of the manuscript.

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Talukdar, N.R., Choudhury, P. & Ahmad, F. Human-elephant conflict hotspots in Assam: a rapid appraisal method. Biodivers Conserv 33 , 2231–2245 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-024-02858-1

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Received : 30 August 2023

Revised : 22 April 2024

Accepted : 24 April 2024

Published : 02 May 2024

Issue Date : June 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-024-02858-1

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Assam: HaatiApp launched to reduce human-elephant conflict

Extending support from the state government, nandita gorlosa, cabinet minister, said this would help multi-stakeholders in the mitigation of human-elephant conflict (hec) for the sake of coexistence.

Silchar: Aaranyak, an NGO based in Guwahati, launched a mobile application, HaatiApp, with the aim to reduce the human-elephant conflict in Assam and surrounding states. 

The app was launched on Saturday evening and was inaugurated by Nandita Gorlosa, cabinet minister for power, sports & youth welfare.

Extending support from the state government, Gorlosa said this would help multi-stakeholders in the mitigation of human-elephant conflict (HEC) for the sake of coexistence.

Bibhuti P Lahkar, who heads the Elephant Research and Conservation Division (ERCD) of Aaranyak, said that this application will create a bridge between government departments and the common people.

“We have to make people aware of it. Once they install the app on their phones, they’ll have access to a large contact, and whenever they see elephants in their area, they can update the forest department about it quickly. This will help the people to be aware and the officials to take immediate action,” he said.

Along with the HaatiApp, a comprehensive Solar Fence Manual in Assamese was also launched by the minister during an event in Guwahati.

Prominent animal conservation activist Padma Shri Parbati Baruah and famous elephant doctor of Assam Padma Shri Kushal Konwar Sharma praised the initiatives.

Baruah said that the Asian elephants in northeast India are facing a myriad of problems, including rapidly shrinking habitats because of expanding human settlements.

“We must learn how to coexist. The HaatiApp and the solar fence manual are expected to facilitate it,” she said.

Sharma raised concerns about the illegal use of electricity to deter elephants, which poses a significant risk to both humans and elephants. He also requested the state power minister to take proactive steps to prevent the electrocution deaths of wild elephants.

Garlosa said that the State Power Department would launch an awareness drive among the grassroots people to prevent electrocution of wild elephants through the use of illegal power connections.

“The common people in some of the HEC hotspots use illegal electric power connections against wild elephants out of fear, which sometimes leads to the death of elephants….With the help of these two techniques, we can reduce such incidents”, she said.

Garlosa further said that steps will be taken by the state’s power department to reach out to the common people of those HEC-affected areas to raise awareness against the use of such illegal electric connections against wild elephants.

The human-animal conflict has seen a rise in recent years. According to the Assam government, illegal encroachment on forest land is one of the biggest reasons for the conflict.

However, in several cases, the victims claimed that they were trying to maintain coexistence, but elephants attacked their houses in search of food. They said that there was no other option to prevent it except using electricity.

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