The U.S. plans to spend around $1.5 million to protect Asian elephants in their native countries this year, according to a new grant announcement.
The Asian Elephant Conservation Fund, part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) International Affairs division, plans to give money to conservation groups to research elephant populations, prevent poaching, limit the ivory trade, and reduce dangerous “human-elephant conflicts,” among other activities.
Human-elephant conflict includes the occasional rampage of charging elephants, and when elephants “raid farmers’ fields and damage their crops, which they rely on for their livelihoods,” the World Wildlife Fund says. (RELATED: Red Terror: Elephant Tramples Communist Leader)
“Support will also be given to projects that enhance the knowledge of decision makers and other stakeholders,” including journalists, legislators, local leaders, tourists and businesses with a position to promote elephant conservation efforts, the FWS grant says.
FWS awarded one grant of $45,010 in 2015 aimed to reduce human-elephant conflicts and “facilitate harmonious co-existence” by implementing a “sensitization program for journalists, informing the public via the news media, and training for frontline forest guards, 3 rangers, and foresters,” according to a year-end report from the agency.
The grant amount is in line with the FWS’s previous spending on Asian elephant conservation. FWS spent $1,759,070 on Asian elephant conservation in 33 separate grants in 2015. In the biggest single grant that year, $110,000 went to fund construction of three anti-poaching campsites to “improve the living conditions of frontline rangers and patrol staff,” according to FWS’s year end report.
The FWS, a part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, spent $8,236,000 on Asian elephant conservation between 2007 and 2011, and $68,215,000 in grants for all international endangered species, according to data from the Wildlife Without Borders report.
“Recent reports from across the 13 Asian elephant range [countries] suggest that there are between 39,500 and 43,500 wild Asian elephants. In addition, there are approximately 13,000 domesticated (working or former working) elephants in Asia,” according to 2013 estimates from GRID-Arundel, a part of the United Nations Environmental Program.
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