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india is one of the most mega diverse countries in the world with over 91 000 species of animals and 40 000 different kinds of plants but among all of those amazingly big and small creatures there are 1.4 billion humans some encounters are peaceful while others are not so much but that's where wildlife survey comes in with dr christie currant at the helm she's dedicated her life to resolving conflicts between humans and animals so they can co-exist helping farmers get their livelihoods back and for animals to be free follow along in this next film as we see how dr currant is able to bring peace in more ways than one please enjoy wild harmony a production by wild elements i think the real challenge is
how do you support a country like india where there's 1.4 billion people and we're sharing space with less than five percent of land set aside for wildlife i think covert 19 has made all of us aware of our deep connections to nature i spent the first 17 years of my childhood traveling to different parks across india watching animals first hand i got to do crazy things that most kids don't get to do i learned to set up camera traps learn to wear receivers and track tigers over the last 50 years there's been a concerted effort by the indian government by scientists by conservationists to bring wildlife back and the price of this recovery is the high human wildlife conflict we see in india today
what do i mean by conflict it's crop loss livestock predation property damage and occasionally even human injury and death my research over the last 10 years has taken us to over 3 000 villages across india where we've talked to people about human wildlife conflict in the communities that we work in we find that women in particular bear the brunt of conflict losing their crops or livestock or having a family member injured so i think women are affected professionally and in their daily lives across india
over 80 to 100 000 incidents of human wildlife conflict are reported to the indian government after spending a decade researching this i started to get frustrated and realized that we needed to go beyond documenting the problem to actually solving this five years ago we launched the wild save a program seve means in service soft it is basically a toll-free number that you can call into when you have a leopard on your roof a tiger in your farm our field staff arrive at the scene help assess the damage and document the claim so that when it's filed in a government office the claim is not rejected foreign i do believe that if you expect communities to live alongside wildlife when they suffer the negative
consequences we have to be there every single time so we've been working with all of these communities trying to assist them in many different ways in 2018 i started to notice that kids who were living in these villages who were actually getting to see tigers or elephants in real life lived in fear of these animals or didn't care about them so in 2018 we launched wild chalet means school in kannada it's a conservation education program implemented in schools around wildlife reserves across the country the purpose of the program is to instill empathy for wildlife inspire kids to care for wildlife and wild places and also give them some basic safety coping mechanisms if they're in a conflict situation
as the pandemic hit the world i realized that it wasn't enough to talk to these communities living next to wildlife just about human wildlife conflicts deforesting infringing into deep remote areas hunting and poaching a wildlife all create reservoirs where there is diseases that will jump from humans to animals or the other way round covert 19 is one but there are many other zoonotic diseases found in the western guards so we launched wild surakshay surakshe means safety it's a public safety and community outreach program that is working with frontline government staff to ensure that people living in close proximity to wildlife understand why zoonotic diseases are transmitted between wildlife and people and how do
you keep both people and wildlife safe for the long term going forward i hope we're more aware that human activities can cause long-term impacts not just in one place but around the entire planet i think women as scientists and as conservationists in india and the world have come a very long way but despite our abilities our passion our interest and our commitment we're still often questioned and i think that absolutely needs to change i fundamentally believe that more people care for wildlife than ever before i see the power of storytelling
i see how there are more citizen scientists getting involved in research and i think a combination of this will get more and more people to fight to save the wildlife and wild places we all care about
