Keeping everyone informed
While the Sri Lankan Leopard rightly commands global attention, three of the country’s three wild cat species quietly live on the margins of public awareness — and increasingly, on the margins of survival.
There will be future cyclones and other such natural cataclysms as the warming equatorial seas result in greater surface evaporation that feed rain clouds and strong winds. In Sri Lanka, Cyclone Ditwah exposed a critical gap in dealing with such an event: the lack of integration between disaster preparedness and ecosystem health. Sri Lanka must evolve from viewing ecosystems as "victims" of climate change to treating them as the "primary defence" in mitigating climate disasters. We need to stop relying solely on concrete seawalls and drainage canals which fail during extreme weather. We need to move to hybrid engineering thereby combining hard infrastructure with green buffers. This requires realigning national strategies to treat Ecosystem-Based Disaster Risk Reduction (Eco-DRR) as a National Security Priority.
The Wildlife and Nature Protection Society of Sri Lanka (WNPS) joins the global conservation community in mourning the passing of Dr. Jane Goodall — an extraordinary scientist, visionary conservationist, and a true champion of nature. Her work transformed our understanding of the natural world and, more importantly, our place within it.
In a landmark partnership blending ecology and heritage, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, through The Lunuganga Trust, has joined with Preserving Land and Nature (Guarantee) Limited (PLANT) to restore two islands in the mangrove-rich Bentota lagoon—Honduwa and Appaladuwa. A recently signed MoU outlines their long-term conservation, making them models for private land stewardship at a time when Sri Lanka’s forests rely heavily on state reserves.
Sri Lanka has lost more than 6,400 elephants in the past 24 years — an average of over 260 per year — and 250 more have died in just the first six months of 2025. For Jehan CanagaRetna, Vice President and Head of the Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) Sub-Committee of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society (WNPS), these statistics are a painful reminder of a crisis that has escalated to alarming levels.
Born free…and wild…to a devoted mother who would sacrifice her life for you, and to others of your kind who would do their utmost to protect you. Free to roam over vast spaces wherever the group took you, learning, feeding, playing, and doing whatever a young elephant is born to do. Suddenly, without any warning, whether gunshot, explosion or electrocution or poison or accident, and it all disappears in brief, confusing, painful moments, and you are alone apart from being surrounded by a noisy throng of beings you had been taught to fear. Mother is now a lifeless or dying heap on the ground; protective siblings, aunts, and cousins have disappeared, either in terror or hopelessness; today has become a living nightmare. What? Why? Who? Where? What was once filled with the promise of future has suddenly come to an end. Welcome to the suffering of an elephant orphan.