Forests in Indonesia are disappearing at an alarming rate, because the large population of poor rural people require land for agriculture. In Indonesia, forest fire is used to clear land and for protest, indirectly increasing opportunities for human-elephant interaction. Human-elephant conflict is a problem for elephant conservation and human wellbeing in all areas where elephants and humans compete for space, and is most severe in Asia. This paper presents a case study of poor rural people living near Way Kambas National Park, on the island of Sumatra. The park is valued for its critically endangered and endangered mega-fauna, but is a hotspot for both forest arson and human-elephant conflict. We describe the multifactorial conflict happening in the park, which involves arson, poaching, police brutality, and violation of elephants. Workshops with villagers and park stakeholders reveal villager-park interaction, and expose multiple levels of resentment and vicious retribution. Villagers resent the park for a multitude of reasons and take direct action, burning the park and killing elephants. We conclude that saving Way Kambas National Park will ultimately require construction of a barrier preventing human and elephant movement in and out of the park. However in the immediate term, successful conservation must understand and address villager-park conflict, respond to threats of arson, and help villagers protect farms from elephants.
Introduction
Creation of national parks to preserve biodiversity can have unintended management consequences and create conflicts with adjacent and displaced communities, due to changes in land use rights and displacement of communities in and near the park [1]. Local people who historically used the land are prevented from continued use [1] and suffer the effects, such as crop raiding, of living in close proximity to wildlife populations [2]. This is a particular concern for subsistence communities often living season to season [2, 3].
Poverty and economic progress are the main concerns for rural people [3] in Indonesia, with approximately half the population living below or close to the poverty line [4]. Compounding this, many of Indonesia's impoverished people have been uprooted and disconnected through various policies of transmigration over the last century [5, 6], causing rapid expansion of human populations in the outer islands and subsequent destruction of forests and loss of wildlife through broad-scale land clearing and agricultural expansion [567–8]. The transmigration programme [5] established a population of people with weak traditional connections to the land they now inhabit, who see forests and biodiversity as a resource [7] to be exploited rather than a part of their cultural heritage to be preserved [234567–8].
Indonesian forest laws state that adat law, permitting traditional activities by indigenous people [8910–11], only applies to a few designated areas of forest. However, poor rural people consider the restrictions of adat law inherently unfair [8, 10, 11], with the result that adat law is widely invoked by local people who continue to use the forest in traditional ways [1011–12]. Poor subsistence farmers in Indonesia traditionally use fire to convert forest to agricultural land, to improve hunting, and to protest against authority [11, 12, 15, 16]. The burning of forest is often seen as a legitimate activity, and where forest law conflicts with previous uses or traditional adat law [14151617–18], the forest law is ignored or defied. To rural people, changing the legal status of the land from free-use wilderness to protected forest unfairly obstructs their activities and erodes family security [11, 14, 16]. This conflict of views creates the potential for civil disobedience, which Indonesian rural societies express with forest arson, among other things [1617–18].
In Indonesia, wild animals live in close proximity to poor agricultural communities [2], and on the large island of Sumatra, elephants and tigers are the main protagonists in human wildlife conflict [2], with elephants commonly raiding crops and causing financial distress [2]. In studies of elephant conflict in Way Kambas National Park [2, 19], elephant conflict is shown to be of such major problem that villagers guard their fields every night. Following trials of many methods to reduce conflict, including beehives, hot chili-pepper paste smeared on trees and fencing [20, 21], the government has constructed canals to prevent elephants passing out of the park, but as we reveal, the canals are poorly maintained and elephant conflict continues around the park.
We used Way Kambas National Park (WKNP) in Sumatra as a case study, to explore issues and drivers of villager-park conflict. Within WKNP there is ongoing conflict between park managers wishing to uphold the law and protect biodiversity, and villagers struggling to provide physical, social and economic security for the family. Villagers express resentment that the park protects biodiversity with little consideration of their immediate needs for security and income. This conflict drives vindictive retribution, compounding the problems of protecting the region's biodiversity. Our series of community interviews and meetings revealed that while park and conservation try to protect the forest and prevent arson, villagers, fearing elephants and financial ruin, continue to burn the park. We determine the key issues from the villagers' perspectives, and suggest a suite of actions that would reduce the level of human-wildlife conflict.
Methods
Study Area
WKNP is situated in Lampung province, on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Located on the south-eastern flood plains of Sumatra (Fig. 1), it comprises 1,300 square kilometres of lowland, fresh-water (non-peat) swamp forest. The park supports populations of critically endangered and endangered Sumatran fauna [22], including Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis), Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus) and Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus). From a 2005 survey, Sumatran elephant populations in the park are estimated at 180 individuals [23].
The rainforest habitat in WKNP is 75% degraded [23, 24] (Fig. 2), due to logging in the 1960s and '70s, and more recently, arson-induced wildfires. The annual burning of the park has modified the habitat significantly, with half of the land area dominated by degraded, highly flammable grasslands [24]. WKNP is bordered on the east by the Java Sea, and on the north and south by rivers, but on the western side the park directly abuts village farmlands. Due to the intense history of conflict over many years, it has been identified as a hotspot for human-elephant conflict [2, 20, 23].
Fig. 2
Way Kambas National Park, 2004. Map of Way Kambas National Park showing degraded land area [53]
Sampling
Community meetings were organised to discuss issues affecting relationships between WKNP management and adjacent communities. Focus group discussions with key informants revealed local beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions regarding fire, elephants, and other issues. The beliefs are significant because they are the drivers of human behaviour [25]. We applied qualitative research principles [26], asking open-ended questions to avoid leading the dialogue [26] and reflective listening techniques to encourage responses [27]. Meetings were structured around the Mirror Experience Effect [28], whereby trust and confidence were established by a repeating pattern, asking simple questions about park, fire, and solutions. We validated data in a three-tiered process [26], in which focus group meetings, a park stakeholder meeting, and one-on-one interviews followed each other. At each phase, themes and patterns were tested, discussed, refined, and validated by group consensus.
Data were gathered at three focus group meetings, one stakeholder meeting, and a series of private interviews. The focus group meetings, with twenty participants, including fifteen villagers and five managers, were kept small to encourage contribution and participation, and were completed during a two-week period, May 24 to June 06, 2014. Park and community leaders were invited to attend a park stakeholder meeting. Results of the focus groups were presented to the stakeholders as a power point, and they were asked for comment, discussion, expansion, refinement, and finally for validation of the data. The fourteen stakeholders included project managers, field assistants, park managers, forest police, veterinarians, elephant managers, and local conservationists. Project managers and field assistants were drawn from habitat regeneration projects undertaken in the park. Researchers were approached by a further 10 individuals, who requested private interviews in order to impart information of a sensitive nature. Semi-structured interviews [26] were conducted to expand, refine, and validate the data. Because Indonesian society and work in the park are viewed as culturally masculine, most of the eighty-four study participants were men, with only nine female managers being involved. Informed consent was obtained prior to all interviews. Members of local conservation alliance, Alliansi Lestari Rimba Terpadu (ALeRT), provided translation of Indonesian language and local dialect.
Results and Discussion
Successful conservation [2930–31] integrates local villagers, so that they are heard, feel supported, and contribute to solutions. Nyhus [2] advises that the communities living close to the park should be included in programmes and benefits, as part of a “community buffer zone,” important for park protection. This should be more than simple appeasement, as genuine engagement means that the community impacted by decisions, and not just agency experts, can bring relevant knowledge to decisions [32, 33].
The results of this study (Appendix 1) consist of a number of community concerns, which were raised and discussed at the meetings. While research was designed to be qualitative, we tried to validate the data by use of reflective listening techniques and the three tiered system. Following are the points of consensus.
Human-elephant conflict
The community meetings revealed that of the multifarious issues and dynamics provoking conflict and compounding non-compliance in WKNP, crop raiding by elephants was the greatest issue.
Villagers, fearing calamitous injury and overwhelming property damage, are driven to take violent retribution against elephants and the park, including forest arson.
WKNP villagers believe that crop raiding increased when out-of-area elephants were captured and moved from forest remnants to WKNP in the 1980s [2]. Despite many schemes to mitigate human-elephant conflict [20, 21], elephants continue to forage on farms, leaving villagers financially exposed and in physical danger.
Villagers expressed their fear of impending calamity from elephants. They anticipate injury or death to farmer and family, destruction of farm and home, and income loss. In WKNP, where canals successfully obstruct elephant movement [19, 20], but are not well maintained, vigilant guarding systems remain essential for village protection. From community meetings a picture arose of the violent defence of farms, whereby villagers apply spiked foot-traps and guns to maim and kill elephants, or drive herds of elephants away from the park and across the highway as a form of protest against the park, increasing the likelihood of injury to elephants. While this study did not attempt to determine the elephant death rate from conflict, rangers reported evidence that it occurs and may be increasing.
Rangers, police, and elephant handlers with trained elephants, attempting to protect the village, get caught up in chaotic situations at night, with armed villagers and enraged elephants, and are unable to prevent the violence. Discussions revealed that villagers near WKNP resent the park's priority for protection of wildlife over villager concerns and its failure to maintain canals and ensure village safety.
Forest Fire conflict
Forest arson is rampant in the park, and Sutanto [24] asserts that 100% of forest fires in WKNP are man-made. Fire annually affects up to 50% of the land area of the park [24], creating vast degraded grasslands of low biological value [34, 35], exacerbating habitat decline, increasing biodiversity loss [3637–38], and undermining the sustainability of regeneration activities [39].
Villagers of WKNP explained how fire is used to improve poaching outcomes and grow livestock fodder. Fire pushes back the forest edge [36, 4041–42] and removes old grass, allowing fresh new green grass to grow. Fresh grass attracts herbivores, such as deer and boar for hunting, and is cut by farmers, who have insufficient land to grow fodder for livestock. Although villagers are concerned that taking deer and boar will result in tigers hunting for food in the village, hunters persist with their traditional practice.
While forest law prohibits arson [9], and there are heavy penalties for those found guilty of igniting fires in forests, including large fines and jail sentences [18], compliance is difficult to enforce [38, 41] and forest law enforcement remains weak [11, 14, 15]. Forest police in WKNP struggle to respond to rampant arson and illegal encroachment, and their efforts to maintain control have earned them a reputation for brutality.
The WKNP community meetings revealed that two levels of poaching occur in the park. On one level, poor villagers poach for sustainability, providing food for the family, but on another level, poachers are organised and rapacious, hunting with large dog packs to gain quick income from the bush-meat trade. Unsustainable over-hunting of bush-meat threatens wildlife populations [43], and systematic, organised bush-meat trade exploits both park and villagers [44]. Furthermore, community meetings established an incontestable link between poaching and forest arson, as all poachers in WKNP light fires to improve hunting outcomes.
Consequently, forest arson destroys forest and habitat restoration efforts [39, 41], and rapacious bush-meat hunting drives park and police to respond with brutality. The result is a downward spiral of resentment, violent retribution, and revenge.
To improve governance and forest management, in 2009 the Ministry of Forestry [13] committed to oversee changes to rule of law, law enforcement, conflict resolution, decentralization, and dialogue-decision processes by improving transparency, accountability, and communication. The Ministry [13] also committed to preventing forest fires and expanding rehabilitation and conservation of degraded forests. However, WKNP villagers expressed perceptions that the police and judiciary have two sets of rules, and while villagers are arrested, beaten and jailed, rich and influential people seem immune to legal consequences. In WKNP, conservation is hampered by unsuccessful conflict resolution, and villagers continue to exploit the land freely.
Mitigation strategies
The complex conflict dynamic in WKNP involves forest arson, bush-meat hunting, elephant crop raiding, and villager revenge in the form of further arson and violation of elephants. Unable to eke out sufficient income from their small farms, villagers burn the land and hunt in the park; elephants, unable to find sufficient resources in the degraded park, supplement their needs from farmland; villagers, threatened and resentful, then set fire to the park and kill and maim elephants.
The future security of this valuable park appears in jeopardy, and conservation must understand, genuinely care about, and address community concerns to gain villagers' goodwill and secure the park. Saving WKNP requires government and international conservation with sufficient commitment to prevent elephants from leaving the park and prevent people from entering and burning the park. Community discussions suggest that the problems of the park can only be fully addressed by the construction of a physical barrier, preventing movement of both humans and elephants in and out of the park. However, immediate resolution at some level must be found for both forest arson and elephant killing.
In the case of WKNP, villager goodwill hinges on both improving economic opportunity and reducing elephant damage to farms. It was apparent from community meetings that villagers' feelings of insecurity and concerns about impending disaster need to be acknowledged, and crop raiding by elephants must be reduced to a level that villagers can tolerate.
Our discussions presented three strategies to reduce human-elephant conflict:
Increase villager resilience, by improving their economic security [21, 32, 45];
Improve villager sense of physical safety [46, 47], by preventing elephants from leaving the park; and
Reduce the need for elephants to forage in farms, by ensuring sufficient habitat, food, and fresh water from inside the park [23, 48].
1. Economic security
Improving the village economy is the most direct way to raise villagers' confidence and resilience and thereby increase their tolerance of elephants [4950–51]. Villagers who have a diversity of incomes are less vulnerable when crops are lost. In WKNP opportunities exist for park employment, but they are limited. Tourism provides work opportunity in hospitality, entertainment, merchandising, and other activities, and conservation provides jobs for field assistants in the park. Villagers who live near the WKNP entrance receive more benefit from park employment and consequently show more confidence and resilience. However, when conservation funding is limited [4950–51] and sustainable incomes for many villagers require long-term projects, park employment is inherently difficult to support. If villager good will is to be gained for WKNP, then donors must be persuaded to support long-term projects and business development.
2. Village safety
In WKNP, where canals are degraded, elephants must be prevented from leaving the park. Hedges and Gunaryadi [20] found that the key to successful reduction of human-elephant conflict involves community-based guarding systems, with early warning and vigilant response. Conservation and habitat restoration projects could help support village protection, using existing watchtowers and reforestation personnel to watch for and help deter elephants, at minimal extra expense to projects.
3. Reducing the need for elephants to exit the park
Providing the needs of elephants from inside the park requires preventing forest arson, restoring habitat and food resources, and assuring fresh water availability. Due to almost total loss of reforestation and regrowth from fire prior to 2010, Sutanto [24] recommended long-term fire management be the first priority of habitat restoration projects. Natural elephant foods have been identified, using captive elephants from the WKNP Elephant Conservation Centre, and these can be planted in reforestation and natural regeneration areas. There is local and at present untested concern about rising salinity and lack of fresh water availability in the park during dry seasons, which requires further research. Rangers believe that animals are dying from lack of fresh water and thirst is driving elephants into villages.
Implications for Conservation
In WKNP, villagers and the park are in conflict over arson, poaching, human-wildlife conflict, law enforcement, and park management. While the park tries to protect forest and wildlife, the villagers continue to burn the forest (converting it to grassland), kill the wildlife, and violate elephants in contempt of the law (Fig. 3). We found that villagers are motivated by their need to survive and protect their families. We conclude that the future of both the forest and elephants are in jeopardy in Sumatra. One clear solution to the escalating violence against national parks is the construction of secure barriers to prevent elephant and human contact. However, in the immediate term, the conflict between the national park and the local communities must be resolved to a level that allows villagers to prosper and biodiversity to survive.
Fig. 3
Photo. A: Frequent burning has converted forests to grassland forcing forest elephants onto farmland. Photo. B: Young elephants are orphaned after being separated from family groups, during human-elephant conflict events. Photo. C: National Park and ALeRT Rangers install camera traps to survey fauna and identify poachers. Photo. D: Local farmers and project managers use a talking stick as a device to assist communication, during community meetings to discuss elephant/human conflict. (Photographs by David Lloyd)
We recommend that conservation support reforestation projects with long-term fire protection strategies, offering long-term employment, planting elephant food trees, and providing early warning and response to elephant movement. Further, conservation should support research into the hypothesis that salinity is rising and fresh water is lacking in the park, placing wildlife at risk. If this is shown to be true, then fresh water solutions must be identified to save WKNP.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Way Kambas National Park and members of the conservation team Aliansi Lestari Rimba Terpadu (ALERT) for their support in assisting us to conduct this research. We also acknowledge the participants from the local community, who were so open in sharing their thoughts and concerns with us.
We also thank the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wildlife Without Borders Asian Elephant Program for supporting the WKNP project combining reforestation and fire protection with elephant early warning and response 2015–2017, thereby providing an opportunity to test the findings of this paper in the field. Finally the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for support to students participating in data collection through the New Colombo Plan Scholarship Program.
