One of the drivers of the sharp decline in the Sumatran Elephant’s populations is that of habitat loss and fragmentation. Among tropical countries in Asia, Indonesia experiences the second highest rate of deforestation, and within Indonesia, Sumatra is striking in that it has had extensive deforestation causing the conversion of 70% of the island’s forested landscape.
Sumatra has lost over two thirds of its natural lowland forests since the 1980s, which are a preferred habitat of the Sumatran Elephants. This resulted in the extinction of Sumatran Elephants in many regions.
Habitat loss stems from the expansion of agriculture plantations and dominant reasons for the overwhelming loss of forests in Sumatra are logging, forest fires as well as the clearing of large forest areas for purposes of planting oil palms, rubber trees and pulpwood.
Since the 1970s, Sumatra has lost 6.6 million ha of forest or 557,000 ha per year (557, 000 ha is equivalent to the size of 1, 042, 709 football fields!) due to legal and illegal logging, conversion of natural forest lands to industrial plantations, and forest encroachment or intrusion.
These low tropical lands that Sumatran Elephants thrive in are also highly sought after by plantation owners because they are non-mountainous and rather flat with an altitude of less than 300m and this makes them highly suited to be farmland as well. Thus, farmers would cut down rainforests and plant crops in these areas instead.
Encroachment from small farms onto elephant habitats in combination with large organisations chopping down hundreds of hectares of forest land for palm oil and pulp plantations, results in massive forest loss.
This causes loss of habitats for the elephants and has serious implications on the elephant’s continued existence!
Deforestation can be seen as a “Tragedy of the Commons”, which refers to the environmental economic phenomenon whereby resources that do not clearly belong to a group or individual are highly likely to be overexploited and depleted because each individual is self-interested and there is no benefit to be gained from conserving the resource. Forests experience the tragedy of the commons through deforestation and in the case of the Sumatran rainforests, farmers and villagers make use of the resource of the forest land to develop agriculture such as palm oil plantations. Everyone has the incentive to use the resource, but since they don’t own it, there is no incentive to conserve it whatsoever. When the utilisation of the resource reaches high levels, there is rapid depletion with little care. Farmers and plantation owners would want to use forest space for their own agriculture plantations, thus they clear forests land using means such as forest fires. This, in turn affects the Sumatran elephants and other species and biodiversity that inhabit in these forests.
There is also Temporal Discounting, a form of short term thinking where people tend to discount risks if their negative effects are not tangible in the short term. Villagers are more focused on the survival benefits of earning their livelihood from their plantations (which results in habitat loss for many elephants) than considering for the protection of the elephants. This short-term thinking threatens the populations of the elephants and there is no long-term solution generated.