Elephant Emergency: A Conservationist’s Plan To Save The Gentle Giants

Malaysia’s biodiversity has been under threat for a long time, thanks to widespread resource harvesting as well as urban and industrial developments that encroach on habitats of wild animals.

That’s where wildlife conservationists like Dr. Farina Othman step in.

She recently won a Whitley Award by the Whitley Fund for Nature, a UK nature charity organisation, for her work in conserving a type of local elephant species.

The species in question is the Bornean elephant, which are considered the world’s smallest elephants.

Native to East Malaysia, specifically the state of Sabah, there are fewer than 1,000 Bornean elephants left in the wild and they have been classified as an endangered species under the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List.

A Bornean elephant herd. Image: Wildlife Conservation Network

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an international non-governmental wildlife preservation organisation, Sabah has lost 60% of the elephant’s natural forest habitat to logging and palm oil plantations in the last 40 years.

This has resulted in the fragmentation of elephant populations, forcing them into small preserved forest areas like the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. Here, native forest pockets are surrounded by vast agricultural estates within the floodplains of the Kinabatangan River.

Saving the elephants will take time, money, and cooperation

According to a report by CNN, Farina has devised a plan to connect the elephant’s habitats by building corridors of wild trees through palm oil plantations.

In 2018, she founded the conservation organisation Seratu Aatai to raise awareness of the elephants and address the rise in human-elephant conflict.

As a consequence of encroaching plantations, the elephants have come into more frequent contact with humans, which sometimes led to crops and buildings being damaged.

Image: Whitley Fund for Nature

This, in turn, leads to conflict between farmers and the elephants and has resulted in 131 Bornean elephants being killed between 2010 and 2020, primarily due to human-related causes such as accidental poisoning or retribution killings.

Farina said although many people understand the importance of elephants to the ecosystem – such as spreading seeds – and know that they are under threat, there is still a “not on my watch” mindset towards the animal. It’s this mindset that Farina aims to change.

“Who else can take that responsibility? I’m Malaysian, so I think it’s time for me to also try to educate and raise awareness,” she told the Atlanta-based news network.

She was given the Whitley Award and over RM280k for her project

Farina was one of six conservationists who was given the 2025 Whitley Award, which includes a £50,000 (RM283,975) prize which she plans to put towards expanding the network of elephant corridors across Sabah.

The award, presented by UK nature charity Whitley Fund for Nature, supports grassroots conservationists in the Global South.

“If only one plantation wants to do this, it won’t work. We need to create a consortium of several plantations so that we can connect this corridor back to the wildlife sanctuary,” she said.

Coexistence requires a lot of teamwork

For a long time, Farina’s biggest challenge was getting the palm planters together, but they met each other in the middle eventually, CNN reported.

“As planters, they actually know the need of preserving biodiversity and also the health of the soil, because this is all contributing back to the trees that they are planting,” she said.

Farina said some farmers have agreed to plant native trees alongside their oil palms, as well as “food chests” of plants that elephants like to eat as a way to encourage them to use the wildlife corridors.

Image: Whitley Fund for Nature

She and her team are also working with plantations to monitor the elephants to better understand their behaviour. This includes training planters on how to assess herd dynamics and recognize individual elephants.

Larger plantations will also be offered sessions on sustainable farming and pest control in an effort to reduce the number of accidental poisonings.

Additionally, Farina also set up a team of elephant rangers with members of the local community, who will monitor populations and help ensure palm planters will know how to interact with elephants safely.

According to the CNN report, Edward Whitley, founder of Whitley Fund for Nature, said “Her innovative project recognises the key role that oil palm companies can play in (elephant) conservation, and her connection to and love for these beautiful giants has helped empower community members to become guardians of their environment”.

Image: Cede Prudente

Farina is concerned that the nature of elephants might change from docile to more aggressive with the rise of human-elephant interaction. But, she hopes that this could be avoided through their work to build forest corridors and community outreach.

When an encounter does happen, she says that people should act calmly and kindly, and that elephants will respond in the same way.

“I believe that they can really read your heart and what is in your mind,” she said as she recalls times when elephants could have hurt her in the past, but didn’t.