Yunnan province's revised wildlife protection regulation recognizes the growing complexity of Asian elephant conservation by expanding protection efforts beyond nature reserves to habitat connectivity, scientific monitoring and human-wildlife coexistence, an internationally renowned elephant expert has said.
The revised Yunnan Provincial Regulation on the Protection of Terrestrial Wildlife, adopted in May and set to take effect on Aug 15, strengthens measures covering habitat protection and restoration, ecological corridors and migration routes, wildlife monitoring and patrols, and emergency rescue.
Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, a Spanish ecologist and professor at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the revised regulation reflects an important evolution in conservation thinking.
"I think the revised regulation is more realistic," he said. "Traditionally, conservation focused mainly on species conservation or protected areas. Increasingly, we want to move toward a more holistic approach."
Rather than viewing elephants as a species confined to protected areas, the regulation recognizes that they move across landscapes shared with people, Campos-Arceiz said.
"Elephants do not only live inside protected areas, they also live outside, where they interact with people. They need to move from one place to another, not stay in the same place forever," he said. "This new regulation acknowledges that complexity."
Campos-Arceiz made the remarks at the ongoing 62nd annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Xishuangbanna, where more than 700 scientists and conservation practitioners from over 60 countries and regions have gathered to discuss topics ranging from tropical forest resilience and cross-border conservation to artificial intelligence and human-wildlife coexistence.
Among the regulation's new measures is support for protecting wildlife habitats beyond existing nature reserves.
It allows local governments to establish conservation zones in important wildlife concentration areas, migration routes and ecological corridors, while encouraging local community participation.
Habitat connectivity is essential because Asian elephants require extensive home ranges to survive, Campos-Arceiz said.
An adult elephant can consume about 150 kilograms of vegetation a day, requiring large home ranges because food resources need time to regenerate. Isolated populations are therefore less resilient than those able to move across connected landscapes, he said.
He cautioned, however, that the role of ecological corridors is often misunderstood. "The function of corridors is not to reduce conflict," he said. "Their role is to promote population connectivity."
Because corridors often pass through landscapes where people live and work, encounters between elephants and communities remain inevitable. Corridors therefore need to be combined with monitoring, early-warning systems and other management measures rather than being viewed as a standalone solution, he said.
"There is no single way to promote human-elephant coexistence. There needs to be multiple approaches to make it work."
The revised regulation also requires local governments in areas heavily affected by wildlife to strengthen monitoring and early-warning systems, emergency planning and preventive measures. It also stipulates compensation for personal injury and property losses caused by protected wildlife and encourages the development of wildlife damage insurance.
Campos-Arceiz said these measures collectively reflect the regulation's holistic approach, reducing risks for nearby communities while allowing elephants to move freely across the landscape.
Looking ahead, Campos-Arceiz said advances in drone technology, genetic research and long-term ecological monitoring will help make Yunnan's wild elephant population one of the best understood in the world, enabling increasingly precise conservation.
However, he said, better science alone will not eliminate conflict.
"We don't expect human-elephant conflict to finish," he said. "What we want is to make the conflict not too intense."
