Elephant Conservation Action Plan for Nepal (2025-2035)

Executive Summary

The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is one of the iconic and the largest terrestrial mammals in Asia, confined in 13 Asian countries including Nepal with less than 50,000 total population in the wild. They play an important role to maintain ecological processes and are known as umbrella species. They are deeply tied with Asian culture and therefore people in the range countries do have some level of cultural and religious tolerance towards them. Asian elephants are listed as Endangered under the IUCN red list of threatened species as its global population is declining due to threats such as habitat loss and fragmentation, disrupted corridors and connectivity, conflict with humans and development, poaching and retaliatory killings.

Nepal has two subpopulations of Asian elephants – population of Jhapa to Chitwan eastern region, and Kapilvastu to Kanchanpur western region. With the roughly estimated population of 230 individuals, the country’s elephant population is increasing steadily despite many conservation and management challenges. Besides, there are about 180 elephants in captivity in the country, out of which some are government managed and other are private. About 150 wild elephants traverse between Nepal and India regularly. The Tarai and Churia region of Nepal contains about 20,000 km2 forest area with high fragmentations out of which only about 12,000 km2 forest area is ecologically suitable for the survival of wild elephants and about 50% of it lies outside the protected areas. The elephant habitat decreased at the rate of 0.27% annually between 1930 and 2020 and still continuing at the same pace. The Government of Nepal has listed the Asian elephant in Schedule - I under the National Park and Wildlife Conservation Act 1973 giving high priority to its protection. Habitat loss and fragmentation, destruction of traditionally traversing ranges and corridors, human elephant conflict, unplanned linear infrastructures without considering the importance of wildlife value and their safety measures such as highways, irrigation canals that are dissecting the elephant habitats, and climate induced effects are some of the key challenges to elephant conservation in Nepal.

This elephant conservation action plan (2025- 2035) has been finalized after a series of stakeholder consultations and sharing at the local, provincial, and national levels, consultations and feedback from national and international experts, and a rigorous literature review. The main goal of the action plan is to ‘maintain a viable population of elephants in harmony with conservation importance and development need in Nepal’. Major objectives set to achieve the goal are:

• Objective 1. Maintain existing elephant habitat, and protect critical corridors and forest patches to provide safe movement to the elephants
   
• Objective 2. Reduce human elephant conflict, minimize retaliatory killing and strengthen human elephant co-existence
   
• Objective 3. Enhance capacity and knowledge base on elephant monitoring and conservation using cutting-edge technologies
   
• Objective 4. Strengthen coordination, cooperation and partnership with local, provincial, national, and global stakeholders for elephant conservation
   
• Objective 5. Control poaching and illegal trade
   
• Objective 6. Manage and maintain a healthy captive elephant population in Nepal

The Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, the Department of Forests and Soil Conservation, and Provincial Ministry of Executive Summary Forests and Environment will take an overall lead in implementing this action plan through various means. The plan has emphasized greater partnership with the local community and global community for the effective implementation of the plan.

The major focus of the plan is on maintaining and strengthening human elephant co-existence by maintaining the forest corridors and connectivity. A total of NPR 4,581,800,000 (In words: four billion five hundred eighty-one million and eight hundred thousand only) has been proposed as indicative budget for the conservation action plan implementation for ten years period. Mid-term review of the plan will be carried out in sixth year and further examined for the improvement in the future.