Asian Elephant Conservation Programme

Launched in 1995, the Asian Elephant Conservation Programme is at the forefront of elephant conservation in south-east Asia, focusing on Indonesia and Cambodia. In partnership with governments, NGOs, a wide range of donors and local communities, the programme is working to protect elephants by increasing our understanding of their needs, safeguarding their habitat and minimizing conflict between elephants and people.

The Asian elephant is declining throughout its range and nearing extinction in the wild in many of the thirteen countries where it occurs.

Its long-term survival is threatened by widespread habitat loss and poaching. Problems faced by the elephants in the region are serious, although varied. In the densely populated countries of Asia, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, large numbers of people live within national parks or on their boundaries. As the natural elephant habitat dwindles to isolated fragments of forest and traditional migration routes are severed, they are forced onto agricultural land or into urban areas. As a result, people and elephants living side by side are increasingly coming into conflict. FFI is working to find ways of balancing their respective needs in order to ensure a more peaceful co-existence between them. We are also aware of the importance of our conservation partners, and work together to achieve results.

In other parts of Asia, such as the Cardamom Mountains in south-west Cambodia, and Nam Phouey in western Laos, vast tracts of land remain, but are under severe threat from logging and the collection of non-timber forest products. Also, in these wilder areas, poaching is anarchic and with ivory traders and middlemen, a booming trade exists that feeds the Chinese markets. We are seeking solutions through a mixture of targeted enforcement efforts, working with local communities and addressing land tenure issues at the national and provincial levels.

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Cambodia is critical to Asian elephant conservation. Credit: Jeremy Holden/FFI.

In Indonesia, FFI is concentrating its conservation efforts on northern Aceh, Sumatra, which still has large areas of undisturbed - and as yet unprotected - forest habitat with significant and viable elephant populations.

FFI has just published the first comprehensive report on the status of the elephant in Vietnam. This report does not make comfortable reading, with numbers down to a handful, in limited habitats, isolated throughout the country. The report concludes that conservation efforts for elephants in Vietnam are better directed outside the national borders, to restock adjacent forest, until such time as urbanization and the ivory trade are under control.

Cambodia is critical to Asian elephant conservation, but work is hampered by the scarcity of field data. FFI is leading surveys of remote forest areas and working with the Cambodian Wildlife Protection Office and Ministry of the Environment to ensure that these elephant strongholds are protected.

Whilst this work is ongoing, field teams are becoming increasingly specific, identifying threats on a very local scale in the coming months. Our teams are now engaging in villages to understand the needs of local people. National level staff are lobbying to secure protected areas based upon FFI survey data. This mission has taken a great leap forward with work on the establishment of the South West Elephant Corridor, a protected area at the core of the elephant range, in liaison with WildAid.

Even in the wild areas of Cambodia, a human-elephant conflict mitigation team is being set up to assist with the inevitable increase in competition for land after so many years of conflict.

The programme also has an applied research and awareness-raising project operating in eastern Cambodia, gathering essential data on habitat requirements and home range sizes. This information will be essential in designing long-term elephant management strategies and identifying appropriate protected areas.

Several FFI staff are also active members of the IUCN SSC Asian elephant specialist group providing region-wide advice to governments and technical bodies.

Recent agreements with CITES will ensure that FFI plays a pivotal role in the implementation of the MIKE (Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants) programme in Asia, designed in response to ivory trade issues. This programme supports capacity building of field monitoring staff, as well as providing valuable standardized data to the global ivory debate. We will work closely in parallel with WCS, as well as CITES-MIKE.

Our work with Asian elephants is a major component of FFI's Asia-Pacific regional programme and elephants are a 'flagship' species for the entire region.