Meet the conservationist helping people live with wild animals
Krithi Karanth, the 2026 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year, is reimagining how wildlife conservation can work.
In India, when an elephant tramples crops or a leopard attacks livestock—or worse, a person—the fallout can be devastating for families. It can also destroy the bonds between humans and nature that are crucial for protecting wildlife. That’s why conservation biologist Krithi Karanth has spent years developing novel strategies to help people live alongside some of the world’s most dangerous animals. For that work, she’s been named the 2026 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year, an award recognizing significant contributions to research and conservation among National Geographic Explorers.
As CEO of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Wildlife Studies, Karanth confronts a paradox: that India, crowded with 1.4 billion people, is also a stronghold for wildlife, home to approximately half of Asia’s elephants and roughly three-quarters of the planet’s wild tigers. Conserving those and other species, she says, requires not just saving habitat but also winning hearts and minds.
One approach has been to launch a platform for users to request government compensation when wildlife damages crops, livestock, or property. It’s called Wild Seve (pronounced say-vay, which means “to serve” in the Kannada language spoken in southwestern India). With a simple toll-free call, victims of a harmful encounter summon the program’s trained field staff to document losses, then file claims and track cases as they’re processed by government officials. By making a potentially fraught system easier to navigate, Wild Seve has helped earn remittance for some 17,000 families—and in doing so, Karanth says, reduced the likelihood of hunting as retribution. Conservation on a shared landscape, she says, means asking, “How do you make sure people are not injured, they’re not killed, they don’t have economic losses? Because when any of that happens, anger builds, and they want to retaliate against the animal.”
But mitigating bad outcomes, Karanth knows, isn’t enough. To help prevent them, she has created a curriculum for schoolkids living near wildlife reserves, called Wild Shaale (sha-lay, which means “school”), designed to inspire curiosity about and respect for animals. Through games, storytelling, and art, the program introduces students to the wildlife living near their communities, exploring why conflicts occur and how to respond safely. After debuting as a pilot program in a few dozen classrooms in 2018, Wild Shaale is now taught in some 1,600 schools across India.
The focus on communities sets Karanth’s work apart, says Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has conducted fieldwork and published papers with Karanth. “It’s fairly common for conservationists to tout putting people at the center of conservation,” he says. “[It’s] far rarer…to know how to actually do it.”
“Krithi has sparked a movement of hope across India,” says National Geographic Society CEO Jill Tiefenthaler. “By combining science, education, and community partnership, she is redefining how people coexist with nature—and what conservation can achieve for communities and young people.”
Next, Karanth wants to apply her ideas outside India, cultivating an international crop of environmental stewards—or even just empathetic neighbors. “Having a set of people who at least tolerate the occurrence and presence of a large animal,” she says, “is a massive victory.”
