CEJ petitions for national policy to conserve elephants

By Shanika Sriyananda

The Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) has filed a petition in the Court of Appeal asking to direct the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to formulate regulations to implement the National Policy for Elephant Conservation to protect the dwindling number of elephants in the country.

The CEJ in its petition to the Court has stated that the Asian elephant, which is one of the most endangered species of large mammals in the world, is existing only in 13 Asian countries including Sri Lanka. The country has only 3,000 wild elephants and this is only 10 percent of the total number of elephants in the country.

"There is a huge contrast compared to the number of elephants that existed a century ago where there were over 10,000" the CEJ sources said. He said that deforestation, destruction and fragmentation of natural habitats due to the rapid growth in the agricultural sector and unplanned expansion of human settlements has lead to a decline in elephant habitats. As a result human-elephant conflicts have increased, contributing to high mortality, rate where three elephants die in every week.

The Sri Lankan elephants, which were protected under the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance, where they were declared as the national animal, is facing the threat of extinction.

Meanwhile, the CEJ told the Court that the current status of the draft 'National Policy for the Conservation and Management of Wild Elephants in Sri Lanka' prepared by the Department of Wildlife Conservation was uncertain and the Department was not vested with statutory powers to make such a Policy.

The CEJ requested the Court to order the Central Environmental Authority to conduct research on the causes for the decline in the number of elephants in the country considering the HEC and to recommend to the Ministry to implement a comprehensive National Policy for elephant conservation.