Challenges to Conservation Efforts

Take a moment and look at the conservation efforts taken by the aforementioned organizations. What do you notice?

Well, most of them undertake similar approaches to conserve Asian elephants population and their habitat such as reducing human-elephant conflict, enforcement of law, and protecting forests with the aim to ensure the integrity of the elephants’ habitats. However, the long-term conservation of viable populations of Asian elephants may posit a range of challenges. Here, we will be placing our focus on some of the major problems.

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Problems in Reducing Human-Elephant Conflicts

Elephants frequently move outside the borders of even the largest conservation areas (i.e., almost 70% of the Asian elephant’s range is now outside national parks and reserves). Meanwhile, human populations in Southeast Asia are increasing at a mean rate of 2.5% a year and the sheer size along with the enormous appetite of elephants mean that it is practically impossible for both humans and elephants to live together where agriculture is the dominant form of land use.

What further aggravates the problem is the fact that wilderness areas are becoming smaller as forests are opening up each year, ultimately forcing many elephants to feed on human’s crops. Further, management of elephants in the wild has also become relatively complex. This is because many protected areas are surrounded by a landscape dominated by people, and wildlife authorities are required to attend to the concerns of the human populations, who is often responsible for elephant depredations.

As you can see, human–elephant conflicts have become widespread and unless innovative measures are adopted to address the concerns of people who compete with the elephants for resources (i.e., the rural poor), Asian elephants will disappear from much, if not most, of its traditional habitat.

Forest Protection can be Difficult

Maintenance of forests can fail for several reasons:

Reasons Explanations
It is difficult to implement enforcement
  • The old rights (for e.g., free access to expensive timber) and privileges of the people continue in most degraded forests.
  • More than one village may have rights in the same forest, which makes it difficult to promote the need to conserve the forests.
  • A deliberate attempt by local villagers to either block the implementation of forest protection policies and/or concentrate benefits in their hands.
Negative responses to government rules and conservation goals
  • Local resource dependence:
    • Perceptible threat of resource depletion, such as depriving them of opportunities for profits and creating deep insecurities about future
    • Difficulty of finding substitutes for forest resources
    • Difficulty or expense attached to leaving the area
  • Insufficient incentive to follow local rules for forest resource management.
Others
  • International agencies have been reluctant to fund restoration and conservation projects, preferring development schemes such as dams and large agricultural operations.
  • Much money accrues to governments and well-connected individuals from exploiting forests, much less from restoration and conservation.
  • There could be a large number of new settlers in a village (may be the poorest residents) who have no traditional rights in forests, as their ancestors did not live in the village at the time of forest settlement. As a result, these people are deprived of benefits and are compelled to obtain them illegally.
  • Users of the forests often leave the community when forest resources become scarce, rather than working to create better management systems.

 Problems with Law Enforcement 

By definition, law enforcement broadly refers to any system by which some members of society act in an organised manner to enforce the law by identifying, deterring, or punishing persons who violate the rules and norms governing that society.

So here is the question, “What if individuals do not comply with the laws and regulations?” If your answer is punishment, you are right! At this juncture, we would like to bring your attention to two keywords, comply and punishment. Keep them in your mind as we proceed on, for you will get to know how these two keywords constitute to the problems of law enforcement.

Problems Explanations
Regulation depends on compliance

Individuals will only follow the rules and regulations if the following conditions are met:

  • They know of and comprehend the rules
  • They are willing to comply – either because of economic incentives, positive attitudes arising from a sense of good citizenship, acceptance of policy goals, or pressure from enforcement activities
  • They are able to comply with the rules

In the event where individuals fail to meet any of the abovementioned conditions, government policy can become ineffective.

Does not lead to internalisation of the norms (i.e., following the rules)

Internalisation of norms, in this case, refers to the idea that people view following the rules as the right thing to do, rather than as coerced behaviour.

Law enforcement does not lead to internalisation of norms as people are merely acting out of compliance, for a set of external incentives or fear of punishment. This would mean that in the absence of incentive systems or that the penalties no longer work on the people, the issue of committing law- and norm-breaking behaviours is likely to transpire. Hence for the rules and regulations to be effective, they have to become stronger and stronger.

Excessive control can induce psychological reaction

Excessive control may cause people to act in ways that are contrary to the proposed rules.

Such behaviour is the human response to threatening circumstances. When humans are confronted with stressors (in this case, governmental control), they may cope in an emotion-focused way by using self-protective techniques such as avoidance, denial, wishful thinking, fatalism, and desensitization to decrease the discomfort of the stress.

Endemic corruption undermines law and policy implementation

Corruption is one of the greatest obstacles to forest protection.

Loggers and other commercial interests tend to persist in exploiting the system for the quick profits derived from what is essentially environmental destruction. The problem looms even larger if law enforcement officials are involved in the over-exploitation of forestry resources and if their actions are tolerated or encouraged by top management.

Based on the challenges, we can see that the needs and interests of humans are one major obstacle that hinders the process of achieving conservation goals. Thus, conservationists in Southeast Asia must adapt their strategies so as to improve people’s livelihoods, because programmes designed for elephants will only succeed if they recognise the concerns and needs of people who compete with the elephants for resources. The emphasis, therefore, must be on accommodating both elephants and human beings. Click here to find out what can be done in the future!

Read More: Timber Trade and Illegal Logging, The Palm Oil Problem, Human-Elephant Conflict, Illegal Hunting and Trade, Capture of Wild Elephants, Theory of Planned Behaviour, Conservation Efforts, Future Directions