Project orange elephant is a conflict specific holistic approach to mitigating human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Human-wildlife conflicts are an increasing problem as human land use encroaches on wildlife habitats. Augmenting farmers' crops with orange trees through Project Orange Elephant has proven to be a simple and effective method for mitigating human-elephant conflicts in Sri Lanka. Similar endeavours could be applied elsewhere in the world. The problem The association between man and elephant in Sri Lanka is ancient and dates back nearly 5000 years. The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), being the largest terrestrial herbivore on the island, naturally requires large and diverse habitats to survive. With human expansion comes land modification, unfortunately to the detriment of elephants. The need of land for human use is an ongoing encroachment of the existing elephant habitat which is being diminished continuously and drastically. As a result, Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) is escalating every year in frequency and intensity. Annually~250 elephants and~80 people are killed due to HEC. Agriculture is the primary rural industry and rice is the staple food in Sri Lanka. Most rice cultivators are small-scale farmers and they are the people who suffer frequently from HEC. These farmers are hampered by poor economies and financial services, limited technology, fragmented landholding, and pre and post-harvest losses, and HEC. Conflict with elephants continue to increase due to inefficient landscape-level planning and land-use practices that are incompatible to coexisting with elephants. Currently, there are very few efforts to develop solutions to resolve the livelihood and environmental concerns resulting due to the negative interactions of agriculture and elephants. Since HEC being a result of agriculture-based land used practices incompatible with elephants, a large part of the solution to mitigate HEC must be based on the introduction of innovative land-use practices.

Elephants in the farm – changing temporal and seasonal patterns of human-elephant interactions in a forest-agriculture matrix in the Western Ghats, India

“…Based on the findings, we suggest innovative and participative land-use practices for reducing conflict. For instance, in Sri Lanka, farmers planted a local variety of orange (Citrus sinensis), which is not attractant to elephants, along with other crops; decrease crop raiding by elephants was a success in reducing conflict while also supplementing farmers' income (Dharmarathne et al, 2020). We also suggest that farmers plant several fruiting trees along coffee plantations that are not attractive to elephants, like avocado, lemon trees and other tropical fruits, by considering ecological suitability and market value (Parker and Osborn, 2006).…”

Current and Future Approaches to Mitigate Conflict between Humans and Asian Elephants: The Potential Use of Aversive Geofencing Devices

“…Planting non-preferred crops e.g., chilli, citrus, bitter gourd, okra, tea, coffee, aromatic medicinal plants etc. [ 18 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 ]…”

Strategies for Advancing Biodiversity Conservation: A case of Human-Elephant Conflict in Yunnan, China

“…Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the accelerating process of modernization, the coincidence between the living area of wild animals and the activity area of human beings has increased (Guerbois et al 2012;Harich et al 2013;Mutinda et al 2014;Songhurst et al 2016;Buchholtz et al 2020;Nayak et al 2022), and the conflict between human beings and wild animals has been occurring and increasing (Palei et al 2014;Talukdar et al 2020), and the problems that need to be solved urgently in countries where wildlife gathering places such as China ( Jackson et al 2008;Pant et al 2016;Van et al 2016;Neupane et al 2017;Puyravaud et al 2017;Hahn et al 2017;Dhakal et al 2019;Koepke et al 2021;Koepke et al 2021). Therefore, scholars continue to seek a balance point between human beings and wildlife to protect biodiversity (Dharmarathne et al 2020). Specific measures include: controlling the scope of elephant activities through sensor facilities (Songhurst 2017;Durnova 2021;Dampage et al 2021); people's inclusiveness of wild animals (Fernando et al 2021); assessing compensation through hedonic pricing and travel cost (Ranjith 2005); strengthen educational exchanges (Zhang et al 2021;Makecha et al 2021).…”