Indian elephant - Threats

Conflicts due to humans constant quest for more land

The main causes for habitat loss and fragmentation vary across Asian elephant habitats. In south Asia, it is the quest for land by an ever increasing human population that causes many illegal encroachments in elephant habitat, thus causing habitat loss and fragmentation. In some cases, it is development activities, such as roads, railway tracks, in crucial corridor areas that fragment the habitat.

Borneo elephant
Borneo's elephants are now coming under very strong extinction pressure. Large-scale conversion of secondary forests to oil palm plantations has begun, and is expected to dramatically increase in the next few years. While elephants do not necessarily require forest to be undisturbed, they do require large tracts of land with plenty of food sources.

These animals readily feed in all kinds of agricultural areas and can cause significant conflicts in areas where their range is fragmented by agriculture. In Sabah, elephants still range over a large connected forest area. Only a few herds are isolated in fragmented, yet still relatively large, forest patches. However, there is a very real danger that the current forest fragments will soon be too small to contain viable populations, and that the large connected forest area will soon be fragmented as planned plantation schemes are carried out.

Localized elephant-human conflicts
In Sabah, most elephant herds on the border of existing plantation schemes at this time cause little conflict, perhaps indicating that these forest patches are still large enough to supply all the elephants' resource needs. However, the Lower Kinabatangan River, and the Deramakot Forest Reserve much further to the west, are currently developing into major conflict sites. Elephant herd size in this combined area may be up to 500 elephants.

Habitat "bottle neck"
The riverine forests of the Lower Kinabatangan, the area's premier remaining elephant habitat, is rapidly being converted to oil palm plantations. The threat of completely disrupting the movements of the resident elephants is very real as the last open habitat "bottle necks" are rapidly being bought up and fenced in by plantations. There are occasional but persistent reports of killings of conflict elephants in the area.