Elephant alert! AI warning systems aim to avoid deadly clashes

India is home to about 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals’ habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. That brings people and wildlife into close contact, and clashes can turn lethal: There have been some 3,000 human casualties in the last five years and over 1,000 elephant deaths since 2014.

In places where elephants tend to wander, warnings from ground-based patrols can sometimes take hours to reach populated areas like villages and farms, so they have failed to prevent much of the damage. In response, state forest departments, NGOs, and locals are beginning to design, test, and deploy a range of artificially intelligent systems that can cut response and warning times to minutes—or even seconds. 

Kanika Gupta is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New Delhi.