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Our Mission
The Jayantha Jayewardene Coexistence Initiative is dedicated to honouring Jayantha Jayewardene's legacy by fostering harmony between humans and wildlife. Our goal is to educate and inspire communities to embrace coexistence as the cornerstone of effective conservation.
Through collaborative research, community engagement, and proactive measures, we aim to minimize human-wildlife conflict, protect biodiversity, and cultivate a shared commitment to safeguarding our natural environment.
To create a world where humanity lives in harmony with nature, ensuring that elephants, wildlife, and people flourish together in resilient ecosystems.
Our Vision
Championing Coexistence
A future where people, elephants, and nature thrive together in harmony, safeguarding Sri Lanka's extraordinary biodiversity for generations to come through understanding, respect, and coexistence.
We envision a future where people and wildlife live together in mutual respect, recognising that the health of our ecosystems and the wellbeing of our communities are inseparable. Guided by Jayantha Jayewardene's lifelong dedication to elephants, biodiversity, and conservation, we aspire to create a world where coexistence is embraced as the cornerstone of environmental stewardship.
Through education, scientific understanding, collaboration, and compassionate leadership, we seek to inspire a society that values, protects, and restores the natural world, ensuring that Sri Lanka's unique biodiversity—and the shared landscapes upon which both people and wildlife depend—continue to thrive for generations to come.
Join Our Conservation Efforts
Frequently Asked Questions
Get Informed
Explore common questions regarding human-wildlife coexistence, conservation strategies, and our initiatives.
Why is coexistence with wildlife essential?
Coexistence is vital as it helps reduce conflicts, promotes biodiversity, and ensures the well-being of both people and wildlife.
How can I help in conservation efforts?
You can assist by supporting local conservation projects, advocating for wildlife-friendly policies, and participating in community-led initiatives.
What are effective ways to promote coexistence?
Promoting coexistence can involve creating awareness campaigns, engaging in habitat restoration, and fostering dialogue between communities and conservationists.
His legacy whispers through the trees, echoes in village classrooms, and trumpets from the jungle depths.
His was a life of fearless service and principled leadership, a blueprint for conservationists and public servants alike.
- Tharindu Muthukumarana
Jayantha Jayewardene
Best known as the Founder and Managing Trustee of the Biodiversity and Elephant Conservation Trust (BECT), Jayewardene was a national leader in efforts to promote human–elephant coexistence. Through BECT, he led school awareness programs across over 2,000 rural schools, fostering a new generation of conservation-minded youth.
His leadership transformed public understanding of elephants — not as threats, but as beings to be respected, protected, and coexisted with.
A Trinity Lion and former rugby captain, Jayewardene was renowned for his strength as a lock forward for both Trinity College and Kandy SC.
He went on to serve 20 years with the Mahaweli Development Project, rising from Resident Project Manager to Managing Director.
In this role, he played a central part in one of Sri Lanka’s most transformative post-independence initiatives — the Mahaweli Development Programme. There, he championed environmentally responsible planning, advocating for the protection of wildlife corridors and buffer zones amid widespread agricultural and infrastructural expansion.
As an Advisor to the Department of Wildlife Conservation, Jayewardene helped shape elephant management strategies, promote ethical wildlife tourism, and design long-term conservation policies rooted in science and sustainability.
His counsel influenced the development of protected areas, strengthened legal protections for wildlife, and emphasised humane, non-lethal methods to address human–elephant conflict.
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Dilum Alagiyawanna
Few men have stood so squarely in the crosshairs of development and conservation in Sri Lanka as Jayantha Jayewardene.
A former rugby forward with a spine of steel, he spent decades grappling with a quieter, more consequential struggle:
How to protect the island’s dwindling wild elephants amid its swelling human population. He approached the challenge not with sentiment, but with a cool blend of ecological knowledge, bureaucratic skill, and public education.
Born in 1944, Jayewardene began his professional life managing tea plantations, a role that gave him intimate insight into how land, labor and wildlife intersect. He later became a senior official in the Mahaweli Development Programme, Sri Lanka’s largest post-independence infrastructure initiative. There, unlike many of his peers, he insisted that economic transformation could — and should — include space for wildlife. He pushed for protected corridors and buffer zones at a time when few colleagues saw elephants as anything more than obstacles to irrigation.
His shift to full-time conservation came through the Biodiversity and Elephant Conservation Trust, which he founded in the 1990s. Where others focused on enforcement or policy alone, Jayewardene saw that shifting attitudes was just as critical. His school awareness programs, rolled out across more than 2,000 schools in conflict zones, reached more than 100,000 children. He believed children were the most effective entry point to change, often citing how lessons brought home could nudge entire families toward tolerance
His writing reflected a similar ethos: pragmatic, data-rich, and fearless in confronting failure. In The Elephant in Sri Lanka, still considered a cornerstone text, he documented the limits of relocation, the politics of elephant captivity, and the hard choices conservationists face in balancing rural livelihoods with species protection. He didn’t romanticize elephants; he sought to understand and manage them. As a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, and a frequent contributor to its journal, Gajah, his views carried weight far beyond Sri Lanka.
He held firm views on ethics, often at odds with political expediency. He criticized the use of elephants in religious parades when it compromised their welfare, and condemned corruption in wildlife enforcement even when it resulted in his professional isolation.
Jayewardene never claimed to have all the answers. But in a country where human-elephant conflict remains deeply politicized and emotionally charged, his evidence-led approach offered a path forward. His absence will be felt—in the forest, in the classroom, and in the spaces where reason once held the floor.
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Rhett Ayers Butler
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