Repost: Interview with Dr. Krithi K. Karanth, Human/Wildlife Conflict Resolution Expert

A Scientist Spotlight Interview

Dr. Krithi K. Karanth

Dr. Krithi K. Karanth is one of the world’s greatest experts on conservation in India and human-wildlife conflict. She currently serves as the Chief Conservation Scientist and Director at the Centre for Wildlife Studies (based in Bengaluru and focused on the Western Ghats) and as a professor at Duke University. She has published over 100 scientific and popular articles based on her 20+ years of field research into human dimensions of wildlife conservation in India and across Asia. Dr. Karanth also became the National Geographic Society’s 10,000th grantee in 2011 and was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2012.

In the interview below (originally published in 2023, now republished for a wider audience), this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Dr. Karanth’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

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Dr. Karanth, thank you so much for this interview. I greatly admire your work, and I look forward to sharing your wisdom with The Weekly Anthropocene readers. If this works for you, I was thinking we could start with a background introduction into your life and work, and then discuss some of your specific projects and research efforts. So: could you tell our readers the story of your family legacy of conservation, and how you chose to claim it as your own career?

My father is a well-known conservation biologist [Dr. K. Ullas Karanth], so I was in the field watching animals for the first 17 years of my life, and I just really enjoyed being outdoors, watching animals, and watching my parents conducting exciting research. As a child, though, if you had asked me what I wanted to be, I would have said an architect or lawyer, I didn’t immediately plan on going into conservation. I ended up going to the University of Florida, and getting degrees in geography and environmental science. When I got to Yale to do my master’s, I realized I wanted to go into conservation.

Could you tell readers more about three of the major projects you’re currently overseeing as leader of the Centre for Wildlife Studies [CWS]? There’s your fascinating Wild Seve program, helping people receive compensation for wildlife-related damages? Then since 2019, you’ve also developed the Wild Shaale program, focusing on teaching rural schoolchildren about wildlife conservation? And in 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, you also started Wild Surakshe, public health workshops focused on preventing wildlife-related disease transmission.

I’d been a scientist for about 15 years, doing a lot of interesting research projects, but I started to get frustrated with the fact that we were just collecting data and not having an impact on the wildlife or the people around us.

Wild Seve

In 2015, I designed the Wild Seve [Service] program. If you were a farmer living on the edge of one of these parks, and elephants damage your property, you can call a toll-free number and one of our staff would arrive at the scene, take pictures, document the conflict event, and help you file a claim. We as an NGO don’t dispense the funding, the government does. CWS focuses on enabling claims from wildlife losses and supports them in receiving ex-gratia payments from the government. So far we have supported in filing more than 22,000 claims and people have received more than 1 million US dollars from the government.

Wild Shaale

Then in 2018, I co-designed the Wild Shaale [School] program with Gabby Salazar, a fellow National Geographic explorer. This program works with kids, to get them inspired and interested in nature through a combination of art, storytelling, and games. We’ve reached over 28,000 children in 700 schools. It gets kids to appreciate local wildlife. Most children know what a polar bear or a kangaroo is, they don’t know their own animals. We also teach them what happens living with animals, in the sense of how you should react when you come across an animal.

Wild Surakshe

In 2020, based on the learning from the Wild Shaale program, we instituted Wild Surakshe [“Security” or “Safety”], because we found that a lot of adults in these communities also didn’t know what to do when they came across an animal. When the pandemic hit, we expanded the Surakshe program from just looking at [human-wildlife] conflict to zoonotic diseases as well, delivering public health and training workshops to people living around 69 different wildlife parks. Wild Surakshe has conducted over 1,000 workshops, involving frontline health and forest staff, community leaders and organizations. What we’ve done is built a network of people who live and work in and around these parks and are now trained in preventing disease transmission, wildlife safety measures, and basic first aid. They detect cases and help people out much quicker than the government response.

“What we’ve done is built a network of people who live and work out of these parks and are now trained in preventing disease transmission, wildlife safety measures, and basic first aid. They detect cases and help people out much quicker than the government response.”

-Dr. Krithi K. Karanth

Can you tell me more about your involvement in the “Humane Highways” project?

That was a conservation film we made to document the impact of highways, directed by well known film maker Shekar Dattatri. We also did a project that looked at infrastructure development in India, and how to keep connectivity for wildlife. This remains a big, big challenge. And we wanted to capture it because in some sense films get the message across better than research papers.

And I believe you were involved with the recent award-winning Kannada-language film, “Flying Elephants-The Mother’s Hope.”

I worked with a lot of brilliant Indian filmmakers, Prakash Matada is the director. It’s a short six-minute film that ended up winning at the two premiere wildlife film festivals. It’s the story of a young elephant and its mother, and it’s tapping into a mythological side of India, to the religious connection.

Could you discuss your recent paper “Human casualties are the dominant cost of human–wildlife conflict in India”? You essentially recommend that preventing human injuries and deaths needs to be placed at the core of conservation efforts, as your work endeavors to do, correct?

We have been collecting human-wildlife conflict data with over 5,000 households to identify the major drivers of conflict, which we were able to do because of the vast amount of data collected from across India. We found surprisingly that sloth bears that were actually the biggest challenge. People don’t know this, they would say it’s tigers or leopards, but it’s sloth bears. And elephants. As the paper clarifies: although encounters with the sloth bear are rare, the probability of human injury when an encounter occurs is much higher than for other species. Elephants cause the most crop damage (by value of destroyed crops), by far. Preventing human casualties and injuries has to be the top priority for conservation.

I’ve read that you’ve done some incredible work integrating newer technologies, like GIS and citizen science, in your conservation projects.

Being a conservation NGO that uses science to make decisions and design conservations, Centre for Wildlife Studies has always relied on citizen science. For over 25 years now we’ve involved citizen scientists in collecting data. Seven and a half thousand people have volunteered since the 1990s with CWS. So it’s been a mix of efforts, and I think it is exciting because for a lot of people who are passionate about wildlife, this is their chance to get out in the forest. Also we’ve had a few people who then got so deeply passionate that they became filmmakers, scientists, conservationists.

All of our programs, conservation and research use GIS, it’s a key tool at the base of everything.

What are your thoughts on the recent rapid increase in tiger numbers in Nepal, from 121 in 2010 to 355 in 2022? This is a big conservation success, but it’s also led to increased human deaths and injuries as Nepali landscapes potentially reach carrying capacity.

(Pictured: a Bengal tiger in Nepal’s Bardia National Park).

So, I obviously celebrate the fact that tiger numbers have gone up in Nepal and some parts of India. Assuming those are standard methods for measuring the increase, that’s impressive. However, as spaces shrink for wildlife and people, the overlap zones are overwhelmingly around protected areas. It’s important to make sure you design for and support people who live with wildlife, with a whole set of tools and programs to prevent, mitigate, and support those affected by human-wildlife conflict.

Could you share one key thing about wildlife conservation in India that most people don’t understand? What should readers know that most people don’t know to get an accurate understanding of the situation?

India is truly extraordinary in the fact that we have very large numbers of people who live alongside some of the most iconic large animals. This is very high densities of people, and yet we’ve kept our wildlife. Compare us to the rest of Asia, particularly East Asia, we’ve done a remarkable job conserving these species.

“India is truly extraordinary in the fact that we have very large numbers of people who live alongside some of the most iconic large animals. This is very high densities of people, and yet we’ve kept our wildlife.”

-Dr. Krithi K. Karanth

What are your thoughts on the future? What is the overall outlook for these amazing species in the 21st century?

I’m an optimist, I look for solutions in order to deal with the issues India has. We are a country with 1.4 billion people, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and if we continue to innovate on conservation I think that will be critical for the future of these species.

What are the most important things to be aware of for climate change in the Indian subcontinent?

It is going to be a major issue for certain species, but there are much bigger conservation threats in India right now. I wouldn’t rank it as the top threat for wildlife.

Many of my readers are in America or Europe right now. What would you advise people from these countries on how to support conservation in India?

Of course, they can donate and volunteer with the Centre for Wildlife Studies, but these issues are not unique to India. There are large mammals in Europe and America, wolves and pumas and lynxes and bears. I would urge people to have more tolerance for these species when they come across them in their own communities. One of the things that makes India special is we have a very high tolerance for living with wildlife.

What has it been like working with National Geographic? Is it well known in India?

National Geographic has a global brand, so people do recognize it in India. I’ve been associated with them for eleven years. The number of Indian people they’ve helped with their grants has grown tremendously in that time. They used to have a very North America focus, but now they have a much more international perspective.

What else would you like to share? What questions haven’t I asked that I should have asked?

I think you’ve covered the breadth of it. What I’m hoping to do is, we’re doing a lot of innovative stuff in India, and a lot of this is very applicable in Africa and other parts of Asia where there are conflicts with wildlife. I’d like to collaborate with others on taking this work and these programs out of India and to other countries.

Where do you go from here?

There’s never going to be a single way to do conservation. What brings me happiness is designing new programs that have impact on the ground, and then scaling them. I’ll be doing that.

“What brings me happiness is designing new programs that have impact on the ground, and then scaling them. I’ll be doing that.”

-Dr. Krithi K. Karanth

Dr. Karanth, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.