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What is going on?
The Tenasserim area in Thailand (adjacent to Myanmar) is home to one of the largest populations of Asian elephants in the world. This makes the area of great importance for the survival of the Asian elephant. The Kuiburi National Park (969 km², established in 1999) is part of the Tenasserim area and hosts around 300 elephants. The unfenced park directly borders large-scale pineapple plantations which are frequently raided by elephants, causing many conflicts between humans and elephants in the area. Numerous mitigation strategies have been employed to stop the elephants from entering the plantations, including bottle fences, fireworks, spotlights, electric fencing, burning tires, and chasing elephants. However, these strategies have not been sufficiently effective in the long-term and are not animal friendly.
There are sustainable solutions!
Three villages in the area have decided to do things differently. Community members in these villages have introduced ecotourism, including homestays and elephant observation, as a solution that can compensate for the costs resulting from human-elephant conflicts. Moreover, they have expressed the desire to commit to more sustainable strategies. With the Bring the Elephant Home Challenge, we can help them realize this. Bring the Elephant Home has developed an integrated approach of community engagement, practical conservation action, and knowledge creation to promote sustainable human-elephant coexistence. By creating and protecting suitable elephant habitat, we make sure that elephants stay within their protected area. This decreases the likelihood of human-elephant conflicts. Through educational programs, we enhance local communities’ understanding of elephants and their habitat needs, and empower them to initiate community-based conservation projects. By providing communities with the knowledge, tools, and means to live in harmony with wild elephants, they now experience benefits from elephants, instead of the nuisance that they experienced in the past. They can generate income from participating in our project, for instance by taking care of the logistics and catering of the projects, organizing homestays, growing and nursing trees, selling honey, construction jobs, selling local projects and everything needed to execute the projects. Only through the active involvement of local communities, we can improve the relationship between humans and elephants.
Challenge goal: Giving workshops on reforestation, beehive and chili fences, agroforestry, guide training, marketing
Target amount: € 3.000 Raised: [text-blocks id=”donation-destination-balance” destination=CHALLENGE_TH_WORKSHOPS plain=”1″]
What can we accomplish together with this amount: By giving workshops in the Community Coexistence Center, understanding and awareness of the value of elephants and sustainable solutions will increase. Communities will have the tools and knowledge to deal effectively with human-elephant conflicts, and to realize peaceful human-elephant coexistence through innovative, pro-elephant and income-generating solutions.
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Conditions
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Bring the Elephant Home is a Dutch charity
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