Futility of elephant drives but development can be based on distribution map
Many are the lessons that Sri Lanka, be it the government, businesses, investors, conservation agencies, environmental groups, non-governmental organisations or people, can learn from this study.
Policy can be shaped based on science, to protect the much-revered elephant and effectively mitigate the human-elephant conflict.
The lessons are:
It is impossible and futile to conduct exorbitantly-costing elephant drives and translocations as the country has been doing in the past 60-70 years in attempts to ‘confine and restrict’ wild elephants to Protected Areas (PAs).
There are more wild elephants outside the PAs than inside.
If Sri Lanka persists in attempts to continue drives and translocations for the ‘attempted’ mitigation of the human-elephant conflict (HEC), the 70% of wild elephants pushed so into PAs, as well as the elephants inside the PAs will, for sure, face a death sentence through starvation, says Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando.
He asks how wild elephants can be taken from 70% of their range and be squeezed into 30% of their range in the PAs, especially when the PAs already have the number of elephants they can carry. He waves a red flag over the fact that those elephants which resist such drives and remain outside the PAs become very aggressive towards people, leading to the escalation of the HEC. The distribution of the wild elephant in Sri Lanka can be the ‘guide’ for government or corporates who wish to invest in projects in the country. Elaborating how this ‘Wild Elephant Guide’ could be used, Dr. Fernando says that potential projects can be assessed based on it, at the project planning stage – do the project proponents wish to launch a project which may attract elephants like banana or maize (corn) cultivations in an area which is densely-populated by elephants? This would be “asking for trouble”.
Thus, when national development priorities are being set, the ‘ Wild Elephant Guide’ will come in handy at the very outset of project planning. If a project is to be in areas where the wild elephants roam and will cause HEC, but has to be done because of national importance, mitigatory measures would have to be included in the project plan, incorporating sustainable mechanisms and funding for their implementation in perpetuity.
Otherwise, such projects should be blacklisted as “irresponsible” by regulatory authorities such as the Central Environmental Authority (CEA).