By Julie Shaw
For the people and wildlife found in the North Bank Landscape in Northeast India, struggle is a constant.
In this area — the northern bank of the Brahmaputra River to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas — nature has provided an impressive wealth of resources including bountiful fresh water, forests and grasslands. But the bounty has its limits, and wildlife and the ever-growing human population are scrambling to get what they need.
Competition for resources has fed intense, often violent political and ethnic conflict. And human population growth and development have pushed wildlife, particularly the region’s elephants, to human settlements in search of food. What they find sometimes is deadly confrontation with farmers who depend on the crops being raided.
It’s a challenging situation for agents of environmental conservation in the region, as the people working on WWF India’s North Bank Landscape project can attest. But the importance of the natural resources to all parties living there, and to the region, keeps their focus on re-establishing balance in the ecosystem.
“We have been trying to impress the society that whatever wildlife conservation we as an organization and the society are talking about is not only for the benefit of the wildlife, but it is for our ecological security which is very critical for our survival as human being on this Earth,” said Anupam Sarmah, coordinator for WWF’s North Bank Landscape project.
The landscape includes about 3,000 square kilometers of protected areas in the states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, such as Manas National Park, and an estimated 3,000 Endangered Asian elephants, as well as tigers.
CEPF is providing funds to the project, specifically for securing the Tipi-Dedjling and Bornadi-Khalingduar corridors for elephant movement and for the conservation of key species while mitigating human-wildlife conflict.
The funds are being used for studies on community dynamics, land use and development of conservation action plans in consultation with stakeholders. The strategy focuses on practices that take human livelihoods into consideration and build awareness and public opinion in favor of conservation.
At a recent community meeting with WWF staff inside a tea estate at the fringe of Bornadi Wildlife Sanctuary, Ananta Bagh, a member of local conservation organization Green Valley Wildlife and Forest Conservation Society, and several other community members articulated some of the difficulties residents face. “Economic growth in the area is very slow,” he said. “Also, the forest is being destroyed because people need to cut wood for their own use and to earn a living. Human-elephant conflict is a problem,” he said, telling WWF staff that these problems need to be addressed before they grow.
The area recently had experienced a very high toll in the human-wildlife conflict: eight people and 10 elephants died as a result in a span of two months in late 2009.
Sarmah is well aware of these issues. He and his team have spent years with the people and environs of the area, and are keenly attuned to the obstacles to a peaceful, healthy ecosystem.
Threats to the elephants include expansion of agriculture, unplanned new human settlement, logging and construction of roads and railways. The elephant population is dwindling because of poaching, floods and diseases. Meanwhile, the competition for resources has eroded the traditional resident support for elephant conservation.
Strategies for easing conflict include land-use plans that bring more separation of elephants from humans, as well as working with government officials to increase their capacity to respond to and prevent clashes between people and elephants, and to respond to claims in elephant-related deaths more quickly. That process is currently taking years. Residents also need to be better informed about their right to compensation.
The team has also developed conservation action plans in consultation with stakeholders, and is implementing these plans with state government and local civil society groups. Those groups include student organizations, a local watershed management committee, women’s groups and teachers. The plans include:
- Establishing stronger legal and physical protections for the Tipi-Dedjling and Bornadi-Khalingduar corridors.
- Initiating activities with communities to demonstrate how sustainable management of natural resources can bring economic returns.
- Initiating habitat restoration measures in priority locations.
- Building capacity of the Forest Department (both technical as well as logistic) to deal with critical conservation issues.
- Taking immediate measures to control human-elephant conflict in the fringe of Bornadi and Khalingduar with a peoples’ initiative.
Sarmah says the effort is making a difference in public opinion in the target area.
“At least a section of the society has now been able to realize that nature conservation means ecological security which means basic things like water, rainfall, all the forest produce — food, fodder, medicine, spice, firewood, etc. — they have been traditionally using since time immemorial,” he said. “It is the question of how sustainably you can manage your own resource."