BHUBANESWAR: Climate change has emerged as a new challenge to wildlife management in the country, said noted ecologist and Asian Elephant expert Raman Sukumar on Sunday.
Addressing the Dharitri Youth Conclave 2024, Sukumar said the recent death of 10 elephants in Madhya Pradesh’s Bandhavgarh tiger reserve, suspected to have been caused by toxicity from eating large quantities of kodo millet crop, also has link to extreme climatic event.
He said cyclonic Dana that hit Odisha last month brought a lot of moisture to the state as well as Madhya Pradesh causing rains at a time when the farmers were harvesting millets. “The moisture and untimely rain us believed to have caused the toxicity and fungal poisoning in the kodo millet that the elephants consumed,” Sukumar said.
He said climate change and extreme climatic events are also acting as a trigger for the wild animals, elephants in particular, to migrate from their natural habitat across the country including Odisha and Jharkhand. The growing human interventions are making the situation worse resulting in human-wildlife conflicts, he said.
As per the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) professor, focus should be laid on climate change mitigation measures rather than climate change adaptation steps and developed countries have a major role to play in this.
Sukumar also pointed out that people in the country are being disincentivised to protect forests. “We should create legal means to empower people to create more forests and improve their livelihood, rather than punishing them for growing forests or restoring them,” he said.
Dharitri editor Tathagata Satpathy urged people to be grateful to nature and work together to protect it.
Dharitri CEO Adyasha Satpathy also spoke.