From conflict to coexistence: lessons from three years on the elephant frontier
Supported by the Darwin Initiative, we placed human livelihoods at the centre of conservation efforts in conflict hotspots across Assam and Meghalaya. Across 20 villages, no conflict-related human or elephant deaths were recorded, while 61% of households increased their income by 30% or more.
For Uttam and Kohinoor Gogoi, who have depended on subsistence farming for years, a herd of elephants walking through their fields overnight was not a sight full of wonder - it was a crisis that brought on a fight for survival. When elephants damaged their crops, the family had to spend what little they had saved on food rather than their son's school fees, which meant their son could not continue his education. One bad night could take months to recover from.
Like the Gogois, across our 20 programme villages in Assam and Meghalaya, around 30% of people live below the poverty line. In this context, living alongside elephants brings a substantial financial pressure that families with very little find almost impossible to absorb.
The consequences of that pressure are clear in the numbers. Assam reported the loss of 80 elephants and 70 humans to conflict every year. Meanwhile, Meghalaya reported 58 elephant and 92 human deaths across 2009-2024.
Our multilayered approach
- Keeping people safe: We installed seasonal solar fencing and early warning systems, giving communities advance notice when elephant herds were approaching homes and fields.
- Strengthening livelihoods: To reduce the financial cost of living alongside elephants, we provided families with training and seed support to diversify their incomes through activities such as growing seasonal vegetables, weaving, mushroom cultivation and fish farming. These opportunities built on existing skills and responded to local market demand.
- Building support for coexistence: Through Gajah Katha (Elephant Stories), a community campaign, we helped strengthen understanding of the link between family wellbeing and elephant conservation, fostering long-term support for coexistence.
The Gogois are a good example of how this worked in practice. After being supported to grow mustard, a crop elephants tend to avoid, they now have income that supports them even when a herd passes through. The elephants did not stop coming. However, by using a crop the herd wasn’t interested in, the family's situation changed enough that a midnight visit no longer meant disaster.
The results across 600 households were striking. In addition to zero conflict-led human or elephant deaths, 61% saw household income increase by 30% or more.
What three years of the programme taught us
Elephant migration through traditional pathways continued; the change was not in elephant behaviour, but in community tolerance and conflict management. Households supported with supplementary livelihoods reported high adherence to not killing wildlife or engaging in illegal logging.
- Communities prioritise tangible benefits: Conservation programming that does not deliver near-term economic returns struggles to maintain engagement. Livelihoods interventions with long return cycles (lemon trees that take three years to bear fruit, for example) saw significantly lower uptake than seasonal crops with visible results within one season.
- Interventions need to be tailored to the region: Our greatest successes came when we built on existing skills and local dietary preferences, and where market access was reliable. Generic livelihood packages transplanted from other contexts underperformed.
- Climate vulnerability is not a background risk: It is a core programme design consideration. Rapid flooding washed away lemon saplings, filled crop fields with silt, and changed elephant migration patterns. Long-term investments without climate resilience built in are fragile.
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Awareness works best when it is connected to material benefits: Communities that saw livelihood improvements were more receptive to conservation messaging. The two reinforce each other, but they have to be sequenced and connected explicitly. Conservation awareness alone, without the livelihood foundation, has limited traction.
What comes next
We are now exploring opportunities to scale this model across emerging human-elephant conflict hotspots in the Western Ghats and Northeast India, expanding our work to 24 villages in the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, a global stronghold for the remaining Asian elephant population.
Image above: Types of livelihood interventions across nine sampled villages.