Aceh Reports Sixth Elephant Death This Year
Kids gather around a 2-year-old elephant cub left behind by its pack and looked after by residents of Blang Pante village in North Aceh district in this June 23, 2013 file photo. The animal died two months after it was found. (Photo courtesy of Silfa)
Banda Aceh. A female Sumatran elephant, estimated to be seven years old, died last week in the district of Aceh Jaya, the sixth elephant death this year in Aceh.
The carcass was found on a river bank in Masen village in the subdistrict of Sampoiniet, Aceh Jaya, on Monday. The animal was estimated to have died a week ago and investigators could not confirm the cause of death on Dec. 3.
“Local residents said the elephant died because it was caught in a trap — there’s a rope on its leg,” Amon Zamora, the head of Aceh’s Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA), told the Jakarta Globe on Tuesday. “The BKSDA team sent to the location is still conducting an investigation.”
Amon said the team was performing an autopsy to investigate the cause of the death, including whether or not the animal had been poisoned — am increasingly common cause of elephant deaths in Aceh.
The recent finding brings the number of elephants found dead in Aceh in 2013 to six.
In May, a 10-year-old male elephant died due to electrocution in Bangkeh village in the Pidie district.
In June, a two-year-old elephant calf died in Blang Plante village in North Aceh, two months after villagers took the animal in after it was left behind by its herd in a nearby plantation.
On July 13, a 30-year-old male elephant was found dead in Ranto Sabon village in Aceh Jaya after being caught in a metal trap.
On July 27, two elephant carcasses were found decaying in an oil palm plantation run by state-owned plantation firm PTPN I in Blang Tualang village in East Aceh district.
Amon said elephant-human conflicts had become widespread across 19 out of 23 districts and municipalities in Aceh, with Aceh Jaya, East Aceh, Pidie, South Aceh, Singkil and North Aceh reporting the most problems.
“The conflicts keep happening because the routes used by elephants have been converted into plantations,” he said. “We’ve called on people several times against disturbing the elephants’ pathway, but it keeps happening.”
Amon said only around 200 Sumatrans elephants remained in the wild in Aceh forests.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has classified Sumatran elephants as critically endangered. The population in the wild — spread over Sumatra and Borneo — is estimated at between 2,400 and 2,800 individuals.
The Worldwide Fund for Nature says around 70 percent of the Sumatran elephant’s habitat has been destroyed by deforestation in the last 25 years.
[FAX ACTION] World Heritage for Leuser Ecosystem letter template and contact list.
Dear friends,
We are writing requesting you to lend your voice to a positive campaign to improve the protection and management of the Leuser Ecosystem (KEL) in Aceh, Sumatra. By faxing the attached letter, to the Governor Aceh, and the provided contact list in attachment, you will greatly emphasise the full list of recipients. In addition we hope this action will gain media attention and act as a catalyst for garnering further support for this campaign.
The attached letter urges the Governor of Aceh to nominate KEL to become a new UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS). You are likely aware of the recent Science article (Le Saout et al., 2013) in which KEL was identified as one of the world’s foremost exceptionally irreplaceable areas for the conservation of threatened species. KEL is already recognized as a protected area under National law in Indonesia, not least due to its critical ecological services to communities, agriculture and industry. A nomination for World Heritage status would build upon this national and international recognition.
You may also be aware of the controversial spatial plan proposed by Aceh Parliament which received a great deal of media attention this year. Recently we have learned that a ‘Pergub’ has also been drafted: a Governors Law on KEL that would ‘legalize’ widespread damage to the critically important lowlands of the NE in particular. This is currently being aggressively pursued in order to push it through before the end of the year, disregarding calls by experts to wait for environmental sensitivity analyses of these irreplaceable areas.
A united positive message from the international scientific community now would therefore be extremely timely. Receiving a large volume of signed faxes from scientists and leading international institutions will highlight the incompatibility of a nomination for World Heritage status with the current Aceh spatial plan and impress upon the Governor of Aceh the fact that our community is paying close attention to the management and protection of this area.
The letter is addressed to the Governor of Aceh and we also ask you to fax the letter to various overseas embassies and the donor/aid community in an attempt to highlight a better way forward for Aceh. The aim is to create a situation in which these organisations can support the Aceh Government with technical expertise and funding to create and implement a scientifically sound spatial plan. A viable plan will maintain the biodiversity and environmental function of Aceh’s forests (e.g., water resources, mitigation of natural disasters), whilst maximising the opportunities for long-term sustainable economic development for Aceh.
We appreciate the effort required to send these as fax, but emails alone risk being drowned out in a “wave of protest” as we also have 4 public email petitions supporting this WHS nomination in preparation. By sending this as fax is separates this action from the easy click petitions, and highlights the importance of this action. Therefore, if you are willing to put your name to the attached letter, we ask that you aim for the highest impact possible and fax it as soon as possible to the list below. The costs of faxing are only manageable shared between us all.
Please find list of contacts and fax numbers in an attachment at the bottom of this post.
If you cannot fax from your institution’s fax machine, here is a link with methods to fax from your computer if you have a landline attached, or by using online services*: http://www.wikihow.com/Fax-Without-Using-a-Fax-Machine
(*Note that you will need to sign up for a 30 day free trial to use some free online fax services, be sure to cancel if you don’t wish to pay a monthly subscription fee beyond that).
Please email a scan of your letter letting us know that you have taken this action to: leuserecosystemwhs@gmail.com
We appreciate you sharing this email with your networks.
Kind regards,
Ian Singleton1 and Rudi Putra2
1Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme
2Future for Nature Award Winner (2013)
sample letter from GRASP letter Aceh Governor
Donate
If you want to support the protection of the Leuser Ecosystem, we recommend you donate to the International Elephant Project. They’re doing great work. Click on the picture to donate.
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