In Assam, Northeast India, the Himalayan foothill forests provide essential habitat for the Asian elephant Elephas maximus. The natural vegetation in the region is moist deciduous forest, but this has mainly been transformed and now contains a mosaic of land uses and vegetation. These include rice cultivation, village settlements, commercial tea plantations and protected areas.

In 2004, a pilot project was established between Chester Zoo (then North of England Zoological Society), United Kingdom and EcoSystems – India, a regional non-governmental organization (NGO), to further learn about the conflict and determine the best way towards sustainable solutions with the impacted communities. This pilot phase became the catalyst for the Assam Haathi Project, which worked with local communities to understand the situation further and identify solutions for addressing the issue collaboratively. The project ran for 14 years, from 2004 to 2018, and conducted many activities to address the human-elephant conflict. This case study highlights a subset of activities that have been conducted by the Assam Haathi Project (hereafter “the project”).