Community Engagement
Our ultimate goal is to ‘Bersatu Hati’ or to create a society that is willing and capable to protect and coexist with elephants and other wildlife. Hence, community engagement in solving human-wildlife conflict is crucial to achieve this goal.
Our strategy plan includes these action steps:
Capacity building
Create awareness about elephant behavior
Facilitate effective mitigation
Capacity building
The Community Honorary Wildlife Warden (CHWW) teams are established in five villages within the Kinabatangan landscape. These teams, consisting of 2 to 5 members, play a crucial role in the region's efforts for wildlife conservation and protection.
Through the citizen science approach, the team gathered important information on human-elephant conflict (HEC) trends and investigated the perception of local communities towards elephant conservation programs, as well as the current physiological status of wild elephants. These findings will be used to plan the most effective mitigation approaches that are suitable for the geographic area and the capacity of the respective local communities.
In collaboration with Sabah Wildlife Department, we conducted training and capacity building to equip the wardens with the necessary skills as a CHWW.
Create awareness about elephant behavior
Human-elephant conflicts often arise due to people feeling threatened by the presence of elephants or when elephants destroy crops. To avoid any conflict situation, it is essential that the local community is equipped with information on elephant behavior. For example, they must be able to differentiate between male and female elephants and know how to react when they encounter them.
We conduct regular seminars and workshops to share our experience with the local community and learn from their local knowledge on conflict-mitigation techniques. We believe that regular communication and sharing sessions will help build the confidence of people to coexist with elephants.
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Facilitate effective mitigation
The oil palm landscape provides vital connectivity for elephant movement.
Therefore, finding a landscape solution for wildlife coexistence and biodiversity conservation is essential. Now that we have a better understanding of elephant ecology and behavior in the oil palm landscape, we collaborate with multiple oil palm industry players (companies, small growers, and smallholders) to:
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Develop LIFE Insurance
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Revise guidelines on better management practices for the mitigation and management of human-elephant conflict in and around oil palm plantations
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Build a Community Honorary Wildlife Warden (CHWW) team in each respective village