Two thirds of the habitat of the Asian elephant they were destroyed in three centuries, according to a study published Thursday, which provides clues for restoring sustainable land use and curbing human-wildlife conflicts.
In Southeast Asia, India and China the various ecosystems adapted to the life of pachyderms, mainly grasslands and tropical forests, “have decreased by almost two thirds since the beginning of the 18th century, which corresponds to a loss of more than three million square kilometers,” he summarizes for AFP Shermin de Silva, from the University of California at San Diego, who led the international research team.
This period corresponds to land use changes dating back to colonial times, as well as the more recent advent of intensive agriculture,” continues de Silva, a Sri Lankan biologist and also founder of the NGO Trunks and Leaves, which specializes in protecting the Asian elephant, threatened with extinction.
According to the study’s conclusions, published in the journal Scientific Reports, Forest exploitation and agriculture have also reduced the average size of elephant habitats by more than 80%.thus going from 99,000 to 16,000 square kilometers.
“The remaining islets are highly fragmented and more than half of them are potentially of poor quality, which can lead to negative interactions between wildlife and humans, especially in agricultural areas,” adds de Silva.
Asian elephants, herbivores capable of consuming up to 150 kilograms of plants a day, can cause significant damage to crops.
The analysis of data on land use between the years 850 and 2015, allowed the team, through computer models, to reconstruct the evolution over 13 centuries and on a continental scale.
The study details that 84% of habitats have been lost in India and 94% in China. Bangladesh, thailand, Vietnam and Sumatra have also seen more than half of these areas destroyed, whereas Malaysia saw an increase over the same period, particularly in Borneo (+61%)
– Connected territories –
“The past is the key to the future,” justifies the biologist: “if we want to protect and restore habitats, we must honestly ask ourselves about the scope of the necessary actions and to do so, have a more precise understanding of the past.”
The method could be adapted to other species and other regions, in order to assess land use practices and restoration programs planned.
When the international community adopted the Kunming-Montréal agreement in December, during the biodiversity COP15, it pledged to protect 30% of the planet’s land by 2030.
“The usual approach, which consists of increasing the proportion of so-called protected lands, is not the solution,” warns the researcher, “because elephants need to move over large expanses“, that is, over interconnected territories.
“Such protection programs can also threaten human livelihoods and cultures,” he stresses, referring to the rights of indigenous peoples. These regularly come into tension with certain logics of scientific conservation, sometimes described by activists as “green colonialism”.
“Instead, we must find a way that allows people and elephants to share landscapes, as well as restore traditional land management systems, where possible,” he says.
These strategies could also benefit tigers, rhinos, and orangutans.as well as wild cattle or deer, explains the biologist.
The Asian elephant, with about 50,000 individuals, two thirds of them in India, is considered “endangered” on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), like the African bush elephant. The third species, the African forest elephant, is “critically endangered.”
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