Elephants and Communities
Exploring the connection between people and elephants and the projects shaping coexistence across Africa and Asia
The Elephant Express
Sharing Space, Sharing Safety in the Okavango
In the Okavango Delta panhandle of Botswana, elephants are moving more freely than they have in years. It is a positive conservation story, but one that also brings real challenges for the people who live alongside them. Daily life, especially for children travelling to school and families accessing healthcare, often means crossing known elephant pathways where encounters can be dangerous.
Elephants and Bees
Where Nature Provides the Solution
In many parts of Africa and Asia, the greatest challenge in elephant conservation is not protecting elephants, it is finding ways for people and elephants to live safely alongside one another.
The Elephants and Bees Project offers a remarkable example of how nature itself can provide that solution. Founded by Lucy King and developed in partnership with Save the Elephants, University of Oxford, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the project is built on a simple but powerful insight: elephants instinctively avoid African honey bees.
Tea time with elephants
In the rolling tea-covered slopes of the Western Ghats, human–elephant interactions unfold in a landscape that is anything but natural forest anymore. Here, Ganesh Raghunathan works with communities to better understand and reduce conflict with Asian elephant in one of India’s most complex shared environments.
A striking feature of this landscape is the way elephants move through tea plantations. At first glance, it may appear that elephants are attracted to the tea itself. However, observations show a more subtle reality: they are not feeding on tea leaves, but on the natural vegetation, particularly weeds and undergrowth, growing between the neatly planted tea bushes.