Paradigm Shift: Human wildlife conflict to human wildlife co-existence 

Using WWF’s human-wildlife conflict (HEC) safe system approach, the project will collate all the available temporal and spatial information on HEC events in the area, and if required collect additional information. Analysis of information should verify the factors that drive HEC in the area cutting across forest ecology, agriculture and other socio-economics parameters. Project will also take advantage of district forest officer’s SMART technology and integrate HEC to produce a digital data collection system to ensure availability of data for HEC. Project will support creation of rapid response team to attend to HEC events and provide services to affected households. The project will also enhance and scale-up the existing best practices and encourage local community innovations. 

Human wildlife conflict (HWC) is one of the biggest challenges affecting the conservation and food security in Bhutan. Conflicts are due to crop and livestock depredation and attacks on humans. Less cited but other important impacts of the conflicts are the hidden costs associated with guarding, forgoing activities due to fear, psychological disturbance, family disruption, livelihood and food insecurity due to crop and livestock losses. Between 2011 and 2015, about 500 domestic animals were killed, more than 420 metric tons of crops lost and 25 human casualties (http://www.kuenselonline.com/review-human-wildlife-conflict-strategy-say-foresters/). Government cash compensation for livestock killed by large predators (tiger, leopard and bear) was discontinued in 2013 due to financial unsustainability of the scheme. As an alternative to this, an insurance scheme called “Gewog Environmental Conservation Committee (GECC)” was initiated in 2009. There were about 40 GECCs operating in the country but were proven unsuccessful and are no longer functional now. Towards preventing HWC, electric/ solar fencing is the most popular measure in Bhutan. Although some information on economic losses exists in the country it is still difficult to accurately quantify the full extent of human and economic loss of HWC in Bhutan. This is largely due to the lack of a single national reporting system and database. Available data are either not on an annual basis or not accurately collected. While it is difficult to quantify due to lack of data, the loss of a single cow – the sole source of household income in rural areas – can have a devastating impact on a family. This is also true with the crop loss where average land holding in Bhutan is around 0.84ha (BLSS 2013) and income diversification is very low. No long-term solution to conflict crisis exists today because the main drivers of conflicts are still not ascertained.

There are just speculations and assumptions of push factors (like habitat degradation) or pull factors (like agricultural productivity) or growth factors (like wildlife population growth). No temporal and spatial data on conflict exists to verify these factors and visualize the real causes of the conflict in the area. Project will be implemented in Gelephu, Samtenling and Shompangkha Gewogs of Sarpang district, in southern Bhutan. Sarpang is one of the human-elephant conflict districts in the country and three gewogs have been identified as hotspots for HEC events. The three gewogs are in the fringes of park forests and close to Indo (Assam)-Bhutan border. The local communities primarily cultivate cash crops like betel nut, chilli, maize, paddy, and banana. Livestock rearing is an integral part of farming in the area and supplements farmers’ income and livelihood. Elephants, wild pigs and hares are the main problem animals that raid crops. Elephants take refuge in Bhutan’s parks as well as the reserve forests in international borders and migrate to cropland during the peak cropping seasons. Elephants damage both food crops and the cash crops inflicting economic losses and fear among the farmers. Besides crop, they also destroy village water tanks, pipelines, shelters and kill domestic animals.