Harmonious relations
Krithi Karanth is the latest person to be awarded a Rolex Award for Enterprise for her work harmonising relations between humans and wildlife in India
Ihad an amazing childhood, thanks to my dad. The minute I turned one, he started taking me to the jungle,’ says scientist and conservationist Dr Krithi Karanth who grew up in India, the daughter of a tiger biologist. ‘We’d spend hours watching animals, and I then helped him set up camera traps or learnt how to track tigers. As a kid, I didn’t really think much of it because I didn’t realise it was unique and unusual.’
Born in 1949, Karanth later left India to study at Duke, Yale and the University of Florida, before returning to her home country. Inspired by a desire to bring about real change in human-wildlife relations, Karanth is now chief conservation scientist at the Centre for Wildlife Studies in India and has led human-wildlife conflict research in 17 sites since 2001.
The Rolex Award for Enterprise – an award set up in 1976 by the then-chairman of Rolex to celebrate those working to improve life and protect the planet – recognises in particular one of Karanth’s projects called Wild Seve. The project started as a toll-free hotline, providing assistance for Indian villagers who might want to file for compensation in order to recoup financial losses caused by wildlife.
Heightened conservation efforts have led to recovered populations of tigers, leopards and elephants across India. While this is a positive step, a large proportion of people live in close proximity to parks and entanglements between wildlife and rural populations can threaten livelihoods. As wildlife continues to damage crops, predate livestock and harm humans, retaliations are sometimes severe.
Every year, the Indian government dispenses US$5 million in compensation to farmers and villagers for wildlife damage. However, research shows that as little as 30 per cent of human-wildlife conflicts are reported in the country. ‘That’s about 300,000 to 500,000 cases a year. Unlike in many other countries, India does have a compensation system in place. In 2015, I came up with the idea of supporting that system through Wild Seve,’ explains Karanth.
Wild Seve now serves half a million people living near Bandipur and Nagarahole National Parks, and has filed 16,000 claims for 7,000 families, who have received more than $600,000 in compensation. The initiative has improved local attitudes and raised awareness of wildlife conflicts throughout India.
Karanth knew that the technology also had downstream applications. ‘While Wild Seve removed the bureaucracy and inefficiency in the government filing system, our long-term monitoring data was also able to identify vulnerable villages reporting repeat incidents,’ she says. Wild Seve’s technology is now being used to protect areas most at-risk from wildlife damage, as well as to target education initiatives that aim to build an understanding of wildlife in the next generation. ‘Working with the communities, we were seeing children who live right next to the parks and regularly saw tigers, leopards and elephants, but they had no excitement for these animals, or lived in fear of them.
So, in 2018, we launched Wild Shaale, which uses information from Wild Seve to launch education programmes in schools, building interest and empathy for wildlife and to teach kids to understand the nature of ecosystems,’ says Karanth.
Key to Wild Seve’s success is the championing of community ownership and trust, something prized by the Rolex Awards. ‘The ability to respond [to incidents] timely goes a long way in building goodwill, where the community realise that you don’t just care about the animals, you also care for the people,’ says Karanth. ‘The Rolex Award for Enterprise has put a stronger spotlight on my work. I’m hoping it brings greater collaborations with organisations working with similar problems in other countries.’
For more information on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, or the Rolex Perpetual Planet campaign, visit: www.rolex.org/environment