China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Pilot insurance program compensates villagers for elephants’ damage
The baby elephant was so small that it didn’t yet know how to swim, but it didn’t hesitate to join others from its roaming herd in Yunnan province when they walked into a fishpond.
Apparently to prevent the baby from being submerged, the adult elephants made great efforts to lower the water level by destroying the banks of the pond.
They succeeded, but most of the fish in the pond died, resulting in a loss to the fishpond’s owner of about 5,000 yuan ($775).
The herd’s damage to the village of Dazhai in the city of Pu’er, Yunnan province, went far beyond that amount, said Ding Chunlin, head of the village committee.
“During the 19 days they stayed in our village, they also caused crop failures on about 30 hectares of farmland,” Ding said.
As the herd wreaked havoc in the village, which spans almost 75 square kilometers, there was no need for villagers to worry about the losses caused by the animals.
As monitors closely watched the herd to ensure people’s safety, employees with an insurance company began assessing villagers’ losses soon after they arrived in the mountain-ringed village on Aug 19, Ding recalled.
About 20 days after the herd left, a total of 210,000 yuan in compensation was transferred to villagers’ bank accounts, he said.
“Villagers who suffered losses need not do anything but provide their ID and bank account numbers,” Ding said.
As the herd continues roaming far from its traditional habitat after leaving Xishuangbanna National Natural Reserve last year, Dazhai provides one example of how Yunnan authorities are dealing with losses caused by the animals.
According to the Yunnan provincial forestry and grassland administration, the province took the lead in the country in 2010 with a pilot insurance program that compensates for damage caused by wild animals. Using only public funds, the insurance program covered the entire province by 2014.
Since 2011, a total of 94.5 million yuan has been provided to compensate for damage caused by elephants in Pu’er, said Zhou Zhitao, an official with Pu’er’s forestry and grassland department.
Yang Hua, an official at the Yunnan provincial forestry and grassland administration, said that to date, a total of 297 million yuan in compensation has been provided in more than 130,000 cases across the province. He did not disclose how much of that was compensation for damage caused by wild elephants.
Listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, Asian elephants are under firstclass State protection in China. Thanks to joint protection efforts, the number of wild Asian elephants has reached about 300, up from around 170 in the 1970s.
The roaming herd continues to cause damage around the city of Yuxi, Yunnan.
More recent data was not available, but a previous media release from the Yuxi government said the herd damaged over 56 hectares of crops in the city between April 16 and May 27.
It cited a preliminary estimate that the direct economic losses caused during that time by the herd reached about 6.8 million yuan.
The damage assessment continues, said Xiang Ruwu, head of the department of fauna and flora of the Yunnan provincial forestry and grassland administration, at a recent news conference.
“All people who suffer damage will be compensated once the work is completed,” he said.
Editor’s Note: A herd of more than a dozen elephants marching northward from their habitat in Xishuangbanna of Yunnan province has drawn worldwide attention. Some Chinese forestry and wildlife experts, mostly from Yunnan, have published a research paper on protecting Asian elephants. Excerpts follow:
China should accord priority to the protection of wildlife, including large mammals such as elephants, as part of its national policy of building an ecological civilization. In China, wild elephants are found only in Yunnan, a province with dense forests and rich in biodiversity. So the Yunnan authorities should shoulder the special responsibility of protecting Asian elephants using domestic and foreign resources, devising a sustainable model for wildlife protection and helping build a harmonious relationship between humans and nature.
Ethnic groups in southern Yunnan have a tradition of worshipping and protecting elephants. No wonder the elephant enjoys a high status in the local culture. And this high cultural status has played a very important role in protecting the Asian elephants throughout Chinese history.
Moreover, the central government has made significant efforts to protect wild elephants. Over the last three decades, the number of wild elephants has grown from about 150 to 300. But despite their total habitat being as expansive as 7,000 square kilometers, most of it is fragmented into patches of forest and close to the residential areas of 12 ethnic groups, which have high population density and are thus under pressure to develop the local economies.
Over the years, China has implemented the Forest Law and the Wildlife Protection Law, and the authorities in Yunnan have introduced regulations and rules that offer strong legal support to the construction of nature reserves and protection of wild animals and their habitats. At present, China has 11 elephant nature reserves covering more than 4,200 sq km.
The administration and management departments of nature reserves in China are cooperating with international wildlife protection organizations to better safeguard flora and fauna in the wild. Also, the government has signed agreements with three provinces of neighboring Laos to set up cross-border nature reserves for Asian elephants covering about 133 sq km.
But the movements of elephant herds and the human-elephant conflicts in Yunnan in recent years reflect the challenges facing elephant conservation in China. Also, about two-thirds of the wild elephants in Yunnan live outside protected areas, partly because the protected forests are mostly covered by woody plants while Asian elephants mainly feed on plantain and gramineae.
Studies have shown that the pachyderms often forage and feed on shrubs and small trees. But the dense forest canopy means a dearth of the ideal food for the elephants in the nature reserves. As a result, they are forced to search for food in nearby farmlands. Besides, the fragmented habitats have also contributed to their wandering into residential areas.
As incidents of wild elephants leaving their natural habitats have been increasing over the past years, the authorities should set up research and conservation institutes to conduct studies to determine how to better protect the animals, for which they would need both government financial support and social investment.
In fact, the authorities need to take certain measures to strengthen the protection for the elephants.
First, local governments should help the local communities to shift from traditional farming to providing ecological services, and use innovative ways to prevent human-elephant conflicts, and improve the overall well-being of local residents.
Second, the local authorities should implement policies to encourage residents to not attack wild animals, including elephants, and instead live in harmony with wildlife in or near the nature reserves, upgrade the protective measures, optimize the structure of food and create corridors to improve the elephant habitats. For this, the governments need to reinforce houses and build boundary walls around the habitats to safeguard people’s lives and property. They should also establish ecological functional zones for the elephants and launch a mechanism to compensate the people who are attacked or whose properties are damaged by the elephants.
Third, the authorities should consider combining the existing nature reserves to create a national park for the Asian elephant, and strengthen the management and operational mechanisms to better protect the elephants as well as boost local development. They should also establish a research and monitoring center and an academic institution to improve the early warning system, and to conduct research on the Asian elephant.
Fourth, there is also a need to attract funds from the international community, especially developed countries, for the study and protection of Asian elephants.
And fifth, the central government could consider strengthening global cooperation and jointly establishing cross-border protection areas and national parks with neighboring countries. In this regard, the central government could take the lead by setting up a foundation to promote international academic exchanges, and show the success of its efforts to protect wild elephants and build an ecological civilization to attract global partners to co-finance and co-develop nature conservation projects to better protect wild elephants and other wildlife.
In other words, China needs to use innovative, feasible and effective measures to better protect wild elephants and their habitats.