The Cabinet of Ministers has approved the drafting of a new National Action Plan for Human-Elephant Conflict Management, replacing a 2020 framework the government says no longer matches the scale of damage being recorded on the ground.
The Cabinet endorsed a proposal from the Minister of Environment to take the necessary steps to formulate the new plan, according to a Cabinet briefing reported by Ada Derana. The 2020 National Action Plan to Mitigate Human-Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka, formulated under the previous administration, has been superseded by a substantially evolved conflict landscape, the briefing said.
Cabinet papers laid out the scope of the problem. The conflict now affects 19 of Sri Lanka’s 25 districts and 134 of 341 Divisional Secretariat Divisions. The 2024 national wild elephant census put the country’s wild elephant population at approximately 7,450 animals. More than a thousand incidents of property damage caused by wild elephants are recorded each year, and the conflict drives a “significant number” of both human fatalities and elephant deaths annually.
Cabinet attributed the escalation to population growth, expanding development activity and deforestation, which have together eroded traditional elephant migratory routes and broken up natural habitats.
The new plan will run parallel to court-led conservation directives. The Court of Appeal recently ordered the Department of Wildlife Conservation and other authorities to inspect district-level conflict management work, including the condition of electric fences. The Ministry of Environment has also recently moved on the corridor agenda, freeing the Wetahirakanda, Hadapanagala and Koholankala migration routes for elephant passage and earlier this month gazetting three new elephant corridors.
Cabinet did not name a deadline for completion of the new plan, the ministries that will lead drafting beyond Environment, or whether the document will be opened to public consultation.
