SRI LANKA WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY INC
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Mission Statement
The Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (www.SLWCS.org) was founded in 1995 to develop a new paradigm for wildlife conservation in Sri Lanka. The SLWCS is registered in Sri Lanka and in the U.S.A. The Society is committed to developing an inclusive conservation strategy that gives consideration to environmental protection, integrated or holistic development that is sustainable, poverty alleviation, social mobilization, decentralization, bottom-up planning, mainstreaming gender, and basically sustaining more with community resources. The SLWCS is highly committed to developing solutions to address issues of environmental, livelihoods, land use and rural poverty since they are very closely linked and need to be addressed simultaneously. Therefore the Society is very committed to involving local people to work with the Society to address issues such as developing sustainable livelihoods and environmental conservation.
About This Cause
The Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society is focused on issues that are considered priorities to increase the quality of life of people and their welfare, i.e. education, community development, capacity building, sustainable development, and a healthy environment. The Society recognizes the fact that the issues that beset wildlife conservation are the symptoms of a varied and diverse regimen of mostly socio-economic causes that drive rural communities to negatively impact their environment. By approaching environmental conservation through a participatory approach the SLWCS formulates its projects and programs from the aspects of human needs and aspirations. The SLWCS operates on the philosophy and basic premise that local communities must actively participate as well as benefit from conservation and research efforts to save threatened ecosystems, endangered wildlife and their habitats. In pursuing this objective the Society develops its projects and programs in a bottom to top process by assessing the resources, strengths, weakness, threats, and needs of a community and their environment. At the same time the Society also approaches conservation in a top-to-bottom process as it realizes that it is essential that regional, national and international planners and stakeholders need to be involved for effective conservation to happen. Since 1997 the SLWCS has promoted conservation through community-based initiatives because the society firmly believes it is the only way to achieve sustainable conservation. The overall vision of SLWCS is to develop a new model for sustainable conservation with the following goals: 1) The protection of biodiversity in priority areas, 2) The promotion of sustainable use of biodiversity, and 3) The strengthening of rural institutions and promoting cooperative governance and community involvement in conservation. The Society’s project to mitigate human-elephant conflict (HEC) still stands out as one of the most successful attempts to resolve HEC in Sri Lanka in an area where humans and elephants share space. Today for the Sri Lankan elephant the biggest challenge for its survival is human-elephant conflicts (HEC). The Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society has been addressing the resolution of HEC for the past 18 years. HEC is one of the biggest environmental and socio-economic crises of rural Sri Lanka. Annually elephants cause over ~US$10 million worth of crop and property damage to rural farmers. In retaliation farmers kill elephants. Every year on average 225 elephants are killed because of this conflict and elephants kill about 60-80 people every year as well. Most of these farmers are killed in their own villages, backyards and fields. This is an alarming situation. HEC is pretty intense in Sri Lanka and is escalating practically every year. We have one of the longest operating participatory community-based HEC resolution projects in the world, which is our Saving Elephants by Helping People (SEHP) Project. The SEHP Project in 2008 received a prestigious UNDP Equator Initiative Equator Prize for its outstanding efforts to alleviate poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Our efforts have made it possible for elephants and people to coexist in a region that used to be rife with conflicts. As the old saying goes, for us now it is a matter of “not just winning the war, but the challenge of keeping the peace.” There is less than 5,000 Asian elephants left in Sri Lanka and they are listed by the IUCN as 'Endangered' and by CITES as a species threatened with extinction. The main threats they face in Sri Lanka are habitat loss due to clearing of forest for subsistence agriculture, poaching for ivory, illegal capture and retribution killing for raiding crops. Through our Saving Elephants by Helping People Project we are striving to make elephants more valuable to the local communities alive rather than dead, by engaging, training and paying locals to be involved in their conservation together with scientists and volunteers and by developing a sustainable tourism program in the area. By engaging and working with locally recruited and trained field assistants the volunteers help to send a strong conservation message to the local communities to value and protect their environment and wildlife. We established Project Orange Elephant (POE) to encourage farmers to cultivate crops such as orange that are not attractive to elephants so they have an alternative income when elephants destroy their rice crop. Since they have a supplementary income the farmers will feel less hostile towards elephants for destroying their rice crop. Through our SCIENCE Program we are educating rural school children to value their environment and to become better stewards to take care of it. In addition we get them to create butterfly gardens and organic gardens to increase local biodiversity. As a volunteer you will be supporting these efforts as well as assisting us in our ongoing efforts to address human-elephant conflicts for the conservation of the endangered Sri Lankan elephant. Through direct and indirect field observations you will help to gather information on elephants, In addition you will also get an opportunity to help collect data on leopards, monitor an alternative land use program, participate in an ongoing bird survey, help to collect data on small mammals and assist in our environmental education program. Volunteers help to gather data on wild elephants to understand elephant ecology, their temporal and spatial distribution to develop effective measures to address human-elephant conflicts. Volunteers get an immersive and enjoyable experience working with SLWCS field staff gathering data on wild elephants, biodiversity, and human-elephant conflicts. Volunteers also get to interact with local communities and experience local culture first hand. The Society’s Face Book: SLWCS Sri Lanka also has a large gallery of photos on the volunteer program. There is additional information about the activities and experiences of volunteers and interns at the following links. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9nUMYWtGfE http://slwcsupdates.blogspot.com https://www.facebook.com/slwcs.srilanka