Since 2005, our Assam Haathi Project (www.assamhaathiproject.org) has tackled the issue through a community-based mitigation and livelihoods approach, coupled with scientific research. With support from Defra’s Darwin Initiative (2007-2012) we developed highly effective methods to keep elephants and people safely apart. We have assisted 20 villages directly and 65 indirectly, reducing crop-raiding and property damage in the best scenarios by up to 78% and 95% respectively, as well as drastically reducing the number of deaths, and engaged 23 communities and around 600 people in new forms of sustainable livelihoods, and protected 1400 households from elephants.

With focused, organized effort and good institutional support, human-elephant conflict situations can be resolved and managed and we propose that a community-based approach in parallel with applied research to understand site-specific dynamics is a good example of best practice, transferrable to other parts of the world with similar challenges.