The Elephant in the Room: Habitat Loss
In the autumn of 2019, I travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo on a photographic assignment as a guest of the team at Virunga National Park, the oldest reserve in the country. Virunga appears from above as a long strip of tropical rainforest along the border with Rwanda and Uganda. It’s filled with towering volcanos and misty mountains and is famously home to not only a few hundred of the last remaining mountain gorillas, but also one of the most vulnerable and isolated populations of forest elephants left in Central Africa.
An hour and a half’s drive north of the city of Goma is Kibumba camp, a collection of canvas tents in a clearing on the slopes of Mount Mikeno surrounded by dense forest. It was a spectacular sight and unlike anywhere I’d been before. In the distance, thunder rumbled as dark rainclouds melted seamlessly into the billowing smoke from the mighty Nyiragonga volcano, which rose from the jungle valleys like a giant pyramid.
I’d finally fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit the Congo, inspired ever since my grandfather’s stories of the elephant graveyard as a child. Under the watchful eye of half a dozen armed rangers, who protect tourists from sporadic banditry and kidnapping, I felt a sense of excitement as I found myself trekking deeper into the jungle in search of the magnificent great apes.
The rangers in Virunga have a special relationship to their charges. They go out every single day to track the gorillas and many of the apes are named after wildlife officers who have been killed by poachers and armed gangs. Many of the gorilla families in Virunga are habituated and used to humans, thanks to the rangers’ dedication, which meant that it didn’t take us long to find them, because the rangers knew where they liked to feed and sleep. Despite the cold chill and incessant rain, I whiled away one of the most exhilarating hours I have ever had, watching these beautiful creatures play, eat and frolic in their natural habitat. It was remarkable to be so close to these wonderful animals and I felt very lucky to be in the presence of such a rare thing. But I wasn’t here just for the gorillas. I wanted to be able to track forest elephants, too.
I had dreamt of this moment for decades, to hack through the volcano forests of my childhood imagination in search of the mystical elephant graveyard. Even though I knew it was fantasy, simply to be here, in the ancient jungles where apes and elephants meet, was magical. Regardless of the chances of actually seeing a forest elephant, I was determined to try.
Benoit, one of the rangers who was guiding the way, burst out laughing at my suggestion. ‘If you want elephants, go and see savannah elephants on the Garamba plains. These forest types are impossible to find.’
He wasn’t wrong. We spent two full days of solid jungle hacking, covering over forty kilometres and having to chop new paths through the dense foliage – and the best we got was spotting a few piles of week-old dung and some footprints around a mud pit. No elephant graveyard; no tusks, not even a few bones, and certainly no live ones to be found.
None of the rangers knew how many elephants had survived in this isolated patch of jungle, but it couldn’t be many, and as I returned to camp, admittedly a little disappointed, I went to stand on the edge of the hillock overlooking the valley.
Despite its wild appearances and the lush, fertile expanse of seemingly endless greenery, I could hear the noise of hundreds of voices; humans, chattering away in the distant villages. Smoke from countless fires spirited upwards from invisible homesteads, and to the east, in Rwanda, I noticed an almost vertical mountain slope had been hacked into terraced fields. Impressive though it was as a work of agriculture, I felt a deep sense of desperation for the future. What chance did the elephants have, if this relentless tide of human growth continues?
The world’s human population has doubled in the last fifty years. In Africa, it has more than trebled, rising from 350 million in 1970 to 1.3 billion people now. Africa’s population will double again in the next thirty years, and it will soar to 4.4 billion people by the end of the century. The global economy has grown four-fold since the 1960s, and global trade has seen a ten-fold increase. All of this means our demands for water, food, shelter, materials and energy have increased exponentially, and will continue to intensify. Rapidly.
The obvious consequence of having more people in the world, taking up more space and using more resources, is that there is less room for wildlife. We humans have now modified more than half of the earth’s land surface in one way or another. So as human populations and needs increase, wildlife will become ever more marginalised.
People have changed the use and structure of this land, which in turn has altered the habitats and had a dramatic impact on the balance of wildlife and ecosystems – the net result being a loss of biodiversity. The biomass (the total weight of living organisms) of all wild mammals globally is less than a tenth of our own biomass. The total global weight of our livestock, however, is nearly double that of humans; we are filling the world with cows, sheep, goats, and chickens. And this all comes at the expense of wildlife.
It is predicted that thousands of wild mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian species will lose their natural habitats in the next fifty years, and so become critically endangered. For the past century or so, protected areas have been the principle solution to counteract biodiversity losses, but the rapid rate of human population growth means there is often encroachment into these parks or reserves. It has been estimated that a third of all protected areas around the globe are under intense pressure from human use. ‘Fortress conservation’ – keeping people out of reserves – is crumbling.
It is no surprise, then, that elephant range across Africa has decreased from an estimated 7.3 million square kilometres in 1979 to just 3 million square kilometres today. Loss, change, or encroachment of elephant habitat can take many forms. Local-scale encroachment by subsistence-level farmers is one end of the problem, with more industrial-level intrusions at the other.
Biologists often talk of ‘carrying capacity’. Simply put, it’s the number of animals that one defined habitat area or ecological system can support without becoming degraded. A given area has physical space for a finite number of plant species, and these plants can feed only a certain number of animal species without being eaten into local extinction, and these herbivorous animals in turn can support a precise number of predators, and so it goes on right up the food chain.
Degrading habitat quality – reducing the amount of plant food species available, for example by allowing overgrazing by livestock, or planting single agricultural crops – decreases the carrying capacity of an area. So, in effect, when biologists talk about decreased carrying capacity, they are essentially talking about habitat loss: a reduction in the amount of land and space available for a species.
Continentally, habitat loss is a major threat to elephants, who need to feed over vast areas to meet their nutritional requirements. The 1979 population of 1.3 million elephants covered a range of about 7.3 million square kilometres. By 1989, the much smaller population of 650,000 elephants covered around 5.9 million square kilometres. And today’s elephant population of 415,000 animals resides in about only 3 million square kilometres across the continent.
Elephant range has halved in thirty years. The potential range of elephants in Africa is around 20 million square kilometres, meaning elephants are currently found in only 15 per cent of their potential range. And of the areas where they are found, less than a third is designated as a park or reserve.
We have a clear problem here. Only 30 per cent of the elephants’ current range is protected, but 84 per cent of elephants (based on Great Elephant Census figures) range inside protected areas. This means they are crowding into a very limited area, presumably where they feel safe.
Moreover, in the same areas as the census counted 352,000 elephants (lower than the total continental figure of 415,000, as remember the census only aimed to count 90 per cent of savannah elephants, and no forest elephants), more than three million head of livestock were also found. Cows, sheep and goats outnumber elephants by ten to one, in prime elephant habitat.
You have only to look at satellite images of the level of deforestation in central African countries such as Uganda and DRC to see how much indigenous rainforest has been lost because of sugar cane and palm oil. Or read any local African newspaper on any given day to see the scale of habitat loss: hydroelectric dams, exploratory oil drilling or mining extraction, heavy logging, and road building, all occurring within elephant habitat inside protected areas, very often with national government backing.
Even when we are not digging up elephant habitat, we can be changing and polluting it, as we are with the rest of the world; with plastic, pesticides, chemicals from industrial waste. And of course, with livestock.
Elephant density – the number of elephants that can be found in any one area – should be related to resources such as water and food availability. It’s biology 101: animals can be found near their sources of food and water. But it has now been shown in several different locations across savannah elephant range that elephant density is best predicted by the presence – or rather the absence – of humans.
Elephants try to avoid humans as much as possible. There is a threshold level of human activity, above which elephants disappear from an area: when any human use reaches about 40–50 per cent of the activity within an area, elephants would prefer to move away to less disturbed habitats. Interestingly, at a continental scale, as the literacy rates and GDP of human populations increase, so does the number of elephants, which makes sense as we know that education levels affect attitudes to conservation. But the flip side: as corruption rates increase, elephant density decreases.
Elephants would prefer to avoid people, but this is not always possible. And when elephants have to live alongside humans – overlapping with them in space, and perhaps trying to use the same resources such as a source of water – conflicts can occur. According to the World Bank, many of the world’s poorest people (those living on less than $1.25 per day) live in rural areas of African elephant range countries, so the people elephants meet and have conflict with are often exactly those people who are already struggling: subsistence-level farmers eking out a living in remote areas.
To many farmers, agriculturalists and pastoralists, elephants represent a distinct threat to livelihood and life. Elephants can cause death, injury, and financial loss to humans. People may see livestock killed and crops eaten or destroyed, or have their daily activities curbed by elephants blocking their path to school, to their employment, to their fields, or to places where they would collect necessary water or firewood.
But of course, these same farmers also represent a threat to wildlife, with elephants having to compete with livestock over access to food, being chased away from water sources or feeding grounds, and perhaps being speared, shot at or poisoned. When people lose their crops or livestock, it can often result in retaliatory killings of elephants – many elephants die in this way every year; even though it can be dangerous for farmers to defend their land against them, with many people also dying in such encounters. Rates of injury or death to humans and elephants are known to increase in times of drought, when competition for resources – the elephant’s desire to access them, and the farmer’s need to defend them – is at a peak.
None of this is meant to imply that the people who are encroaching into elephant and wildlife habitat are necessarily ‘bad’, it is purely that it’s happening, and nobody seems to want to talk about it. Whether at the level of the local farmer looking for space to plant a few crops or raise goats, or governments or corporations needing to expand energy or resource production to feed and fund whole populations, they are simply people trying to make a living.
It is natural and necessary for the nations of Africa to develop and change land for the benefit of their people, and it would be hypocritical of rich Westerners to object. Consider an analysis by the World Wildlife Fund, which showed that if the entire global population was as developed and consumed as much as we do in the high-income ‘global north’ (which essentially comprises western Europe, Israel, Russia, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Canada), we would need three planets to sustain everyone! Given our rates of consumption, we cannot begrudge the development of African nations. But we can hope it is achieved in a more sustainable way than our own development.
The Republic of Botswana is held up as a beacon of such development within Africa. The continent’s oldest continuous democracy, it has a good record of free and fair elections in a multi-party system since its independence from the UK in 1966. With a steadily growing economy and a relatively small population of around 2.3 million people, poverty has been managed pretty well and the country is able to provide a modest, universal old-age pension, which is rare in Africa. Levels of life expectancy, education, and per capita income – factors which together make up the ‘Human Development Index’ – are among the highest in the continent, with only the Seychelles, Mauritius, Algeria and Tunisia doing better.
Yet, like all countries, Botswana has its problems: inequality does remain, there’s high unemployment, and shocking poverty still exists. Some minority San people have been forcibly removed from their historic land and relocated into defined reservations, where unemployment is especially high. Moreover, rainfall is often scant, making water a very precious resource. Drought and desertification are environmental problems that are on the rise, exacerbated by overgrazing by the several million cattle that help to support the economy, making agriculture and pastoralism increasingly difficult.
And yes, the rural population – exactly the people who are already dealing with the greatest problems – regularly faces another issue. The 6-tonne, long-nosed, great, grey hulk of an issue.
All along the edge of the Okavango Delta are small family farms, where local people grow crops to feed their families and sell in the market. One of the biggest complaints I heard when I was there was that elephants would come at night and eat whatever they had planted. I met one man called Jameson, whose fields had been raided a week before.
‘They come when there is no moon,’ he said, ‘when they know they cannot be seen, and eat everything. They are always the big bulls.’
Jameson’s story was a familiar one. I heard another man complain that six elephants rampaged through a three-acre farm and ate over half the crops in a single night. It’s true that elephants tend to crop raid at night, and more so during a new moon, when light levels are lower and the elephants are less likely to be detected.
I met husband-and-wife team Graham McCulloch and Anna Songhurst, who set up the Ecoexist project in the ‘panhandle’ of the Okavango Delta, where 16,000 people live alongside and have to share resources with 18,000 elephants – the largest population of elephants in Africa living outside a protected area.
Graham explained, ‘In this area, farmers plant crops in the fertile lands next to the Okavango River, usually harvesting them between January and April. And this period is also when crop raiding by elephants is most commonly observed – at the peak of the harvest. The elephants do it partly as a means of getting extra minerals like phosphorus, which they can’t forage for in this area.’
Annual peaks in crop raiding do vary across elephant range, depending on local rainfall, but they typically coincide with periods of crop harvesting. In Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, for example, peak crop raiding occurs in the dry season, between April and October, after the bountiful wet-season foraging has come to an end within Gorongosa, but the availability of mature crops outside the park is high. Most raiding occurs a few weeks before crops would have been harvested. And here, elephants seem to favour high-energy crops such as maize.
Graham continued, ‘So, we have a pretty good idea when crop raiding is most likely to happen, which elephants are most likely to crop raid, and sometimes we even understand why elephants choose to crop raid. And now, we have increasing evidence of where crop raiding will occur. The elephants are not stupid, they tend to try their luck in isolated fields near to wild areas, rather than more densely populated areas. If there’s a path, then it’s easier for them to come in quickly and escape. We’ve seen the data from collared elephants, they have been tracked as running in and out of fields, as if they know that it’s naughty and dangerous.
‘The effects of an elephant can devastate a village if a farmer loses all his crops, but it’s not just the economic loss that we have to worry about, it’s had a profound impact on village life, too. People used to sit around the campfire and socialise, but where there is a greater perceived risk, then people won’t go outside at night and hide inside their houses because they’re scared.’
The fear, it seems, runs both ways.
Of course, these problems are not unique to Botswana, with rural subsistence-level farmers across sub-Saharan Africa suffering devastating losses of crops, livestock, water-infrastructure, and even their lives in extreme situations. But the situation in Botswana is interesting, because it is home to the single largest elephant population in the continent, at an estimated 120,000 individuals. And this population has remained pretty constant in size over the past two decades, not suffering the same massive declines as have been evident across much of the rest of Africa.
Recent studies of elephant density and the carrying capacities of the environment, which we looked at in the last chapter, took into account vegetation type, water availability and current poaching rates, and suggest that most elephant populations still fall well below the sizes that could be supported in those areas. The continental population is only a quarter of what it could be for the space that is available today, if those spaces were connected up and elephants could move between them.
By connecting even the limited areas that remain available for elephants, we could be supporting an elephant population today more like that in 1979. In fact, only Hwange, in Zimbabwe, is really exceeding the benchmark population level.
Certainly, some of Botswana’s elephants have been moving about, shifting ranges as rainfall patterns and the location of water sources and food resources change, with associated declines in number in some areas and increases in others. However, the overall elephant population within the country has not really altered in absolute number and despite the continued vociferous claims that the country is overpopulated with elephants, they could in theory support more. But that has missed the point.
Whether they are overpopulated or not, the increases in elephant density we see in these regions are a signal that disturbances are intensifying as a result of increased human–wildlife interaction.
For example, the human population of Botswana has grown by about 600,000 in the last twenty years, which is, of course, more than the entire population of elephants currently in Africa (although that is a pretty low human growth rate compared to many African countries). And like everywhere else in Africa, the human population is going to keep on growing – with Botswana’s population predicted to increase by another 800,000 people in the next two decades.
If there are more people living in Botswana’s rural areas now than there were twenty years ago, it is no surprise that more people are reporting problems with elephants and a common utterance is heard of ‘too many elephants’. A new president has recently taken the reins in Botswana, and he decided to deal with these complaints from the rural electorate by calling for a programme of culling, opening up ivory trading, and also reinstating trophy hunting, which had been banned since 2014.
The culling proposal seems to have been recanted, for now at least, following a huge international outcry. Meanwhile international ivory trading decisions are out of the hands of one president or country, and luckily there is little appetite globally to legalise the ivory trade again. But with trophy hunting, Botswana can make its own decisions. And so, trophy hunting will resume in 2020.
The government argues that with ‘too many elephants’, they can use hunting to reduce or control elephant numbers and lift people living alongside elephants out of poverty. As you might imagine, the arguments this has caused have been intense and sometimes downright nasty.
First up, it is important to note that trophy hunting itself is unlikely to result in any real tangible decline in human–elephant conflict (HEC). Even if some of the males shot as trophies are also those responsible for some crop raiding, we know from the Amboseli population that there is likely to be a large pool of occasional crop raiders, and eliminating one or two, even a handful of them, is therefore unlikely to have any major impact on the overall number of crop raiding and conflict events.
Similarly, shooting the 150 or so males that are licensed for 2020 is not going to have any impact on overall elephant numbers (although if hunting rates increase substantially, it could result in demographic and genetic changes to the population, as we have seen). But I doubt the Botswanan authorities really think that trophy hunting will reduce conflict or elephant numbers directly. Instead, what they hope it will do is raise funds for rural development and increase the goodwill of people living alongside wildlife. Both of which are understandable and laudable aims.
Nevertheless, given how controversial trophy hunting is, we do need to scrutinise the situation in a bit more detail. Has conflict really increased since the 2014 ban on hunting, and will hunting revenue genuinely enable rural development? Perhaps most importantly, are there any alternative, non-lethal, actions that could be more effective in reducing conflict and encouraging sustainable development? And is the claim at the root of all this actually sound – at a time when continental numbers are falling rapidly, are there too many elephants in Botswana?
Despite the vast situational and economic differences between African nations, answering these questions for Botswana could be a model for conflict alleviation and sustainable development right across Africa, so they are worth thinking about carefully.
Everywhere I went in Botswana, people told me that they were encountering more elephants than ever before. Even my brave Bushman guide Kane said that he was fearful for his children sometimes when they went to school. But the matter of whether or not there really is more conflict is up for debate. It is certainly true that people are encountering elephants more now in Botswana – seeing them nearby more often – as the areas being used by both elephants and people shift. Elephants are currently moving back into areas of Botswana where they have not been seen for decades, and some of these regions are much more heavily populated and developed than they were.
But looking at the incidences of HEC reported within the areas where elephants were living up to 2014 – when elephant trophy hunting was banned – Mike Chase of Elephants Without Borders reports that conflict rates have remained constant. That is, the ban itself has not altered rates of conflict, so reinstating trophy hunting is unlikely to impact the actual number of incidences.
Human–elephant conflict is certainly a problem, but reports that it is intensifying could in part be due to perception. Droughts and shifting surface water availability make all aspects of rural life harder, and when things are difficult, we all tend to have a focus point where we channel our anger. Perhaps elephants fulfil such a role for some rural Botswanans. On top of that there is often a mismatch between the reality of crop raiding and people’s perception of it. Large animals – elephants and also, for example, chimpanzees at the forest edges of Uganda – are blamed for much of the destruction, when other pests such as baboons, rats, bush pigs, or birds, are often taking more of the crops.
Importantly, the increased use of mobile telephones and social media has also meant that reporting of elephants spreads quicker, which can lead to rumours circulating faster than ever before. Compensation schemes are another problem. These efforts to offer financial reparation to farmers who have lost crops, or livestock, can end up confusing things.
These schemes are supposed to reduce anger, prevent retaliation, and encourage tolerance among individuals whose livelihoods have been damaged by animals. Damage must be reported to wildlife officials running the schemes, who then assess and quantify the extent of the damage and pay out accordingly. But hidden costs to farmers – economic and social – are not taken into account, only the market value of the lost crop or livestock animal. Such schemes are not always successful, therefore, in genuinely increasing tolerance, and may even increase resentment.
Compensation schemes can also make things worse by implicitly encouraging a ‘human versus wildlife’ perspective, and suggesting that interactions between wildlife and farmers are always costly. By pitting humans against the wildlife that they live alongside, and implying that the wildlife is at fault, compensation schemes may encourage antagonism and fail to inspire farmers to see themselves and the surrounding wildlife as part of the same system, where they could coexist.
This is not to diminish the perspective of Botswana’s rural population: whether or not HEC has actually increased, the problem is serious and people feel like it is increasing, and it is therefore a problem that has to be dealt with.
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with Kane in Botswana, when I asked what he thought was the solution.
‘Lev, you know what,’ he said, ‘maybe all the countries in Europe and the rest of the world should take a herd of elephants each and let them roam free, in the way that you want us to have them to roam free, and see how long you last . . . let’s see what solutions you come up with.’
Although it was clearly a joke, he makes a valid point.
There are various strategies that individual farmers can adopt to alleviate conflict and discourage crop raiding, as we shall explore in the final chapter, but at a countrywide level, there are two main approaches to reduce conflict. The first is to control elephant numbers, the second is to change the perspective of people living alongside wildlife.
The Botswanan government is hoping that hunting will change perspectives and increase tolerance, by providing real financial gain to communities in the form of hunting revenue. There is usually also the gain of meat from the hunts after the trophies have been removed; the importance of this protein for many rural people should not be underestimated. Interestingly, at the same time, the government is going to stop compensation schemes for HEC, perhaps for the reasons outlined above, but it could also have the effect of focusing people’s minds on hunting as a source of recompense for living alongside elephants.
It is true that income and employment for some communities next to hunting concessions fell away after the 2014 hunting ban. But there’s an argument that rescinding the ban could damage Botswana’s ‘brand’ reputation, putting its high-end and very valuable photo-tourism industry at risk – only time will tell.
Accurate data comparing income and employment generated by photographic tourists and trophy hunters is difficult to come by, but on balance, it seems that reinstating hunting may well offer some financial benefits to some communities in some areas but, as ever with trophy hunting, it may also be damaging in other ways. And remember, there are shamefully few examples of communities actually being lifted out of poverty by the income and employment they receive from trophy hunting concessions (although the same argument could be said of conservation tourism in general).
If trophy hunting is unlikely to alleviate HEC – either directly, by removing raiders or reducing populations, or indirectly by increasing the tolerance of people living alongside the elephants – are there any alternative tactics? Even if trophy hunting does end up having a positive effect, it is still good to consider alternatives, given how unpalatable an industry it is to many people.
Let’s begin by thinking about the people, rather than elephants, and how we might increase tolerance and sustainable economic development in order to change or reduce perceptions of conflict.
‘Fortress conservation’ – keeping local people out of parks and reserves – has encouraged the view that the ruling elites and foreign visitors value wildlife more than the lives of the people living alongside elephants, which could understandably breed resentment. And let’s be honest, in many ways that is true. Communities have been marginalised and pushed off productive land to form and maintain wildlife refuges, whilst receiving little or nothing back.
Maasai are asked to not let their cattle graze or drink in many of Kenya and Tanzania’s national parks, because tourists don’t want to see cows. The Herero people in Namibia were pushed out of Etosha National Park in 1907, and their ancestors today still report feeling a sense of loss. And the San of Botswana have been moved out of traditional lands even within our own lifetimes.
When I visited the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is a very clear line in the form of an electric fence dividing community land and national park. Any local person found inside the park is liable to be arrested and sentenced to three years in prison, or if they are armed and threatening may be shot on sight.
Imagine the reaction if all the people living on your street were told to move, because the government wanted to plant a forest where your houses and schools and shops currently were, and when you reasonably asked where you’d be moved to and what you would be given in return, you were pointed to a bare patch of wasteland and handed a shovel and some bricks.
There may be some substantial social wrongs to make up for, but it is hoped that by showing these people that they are respected as citizens, and their lives existing alongside wildlife are valued, then resentment and perceptions of conflict will be reduced. Empowering communities to manage their own safety and livelihoods should enable a view of themselves as respected decision-makers, rather than victims.
Of course, people need incomes, as well as respect. But given the booming wildlife tourism trade, it really can’t be impossible to reconcile the needs of communities with the aims of wildlife conservation. People need to receive real incentives for conserving and protecting the wildlife they live alongside, with tourism proceeds distributed equitably. And people need to understand why conserving wildlife is important.
Perhaps demonstrating why so many people do value wildlife would be a good place to start. I have been amazed by the number of local people I have met in Kenya and Botswana who have never seen a wild elephant. Visits to national parks or reserves are ‘what white people do on holiday’, and it simply doesn’t occur to many citizens to go and view their own national heritage.
Even people living alongside wildlife at the boundaries of reserves have often never been invited into the reserves as tourists – they’ve never had the chance to sit in a dusty Land Rover and watch the animals simply being animals, without conflict or competition with people. Encouraging local residents into reserves, increasing their familiarity with elephants and other animals away from conflict situations, could go a long way towards improving the perceptions of wildlife.
To this end, SANParks in South Africa now runs an annual ‘Know your National Parks’ campaign, where for one week it offers free entry for citizens to many of its parks. The scheme has been growing annually, and it is allowing tens of thousands of people access to wildlife viewing experiences that might otherwise be beyond them. On a much smaller scale, various charitable organisations offer similar schemes, but rolling out such opportunities on a larger scale really could have a significant impact in reducing the ‘us versus wildlife’ mentality.
The aim, then, must be for sustainable and genuinely inclusive development, which fosters coexistence between communities and wildlife. The UN ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ outline seventeen global aims for economic and social development around the globe, stipulating that each is achieved in a sustainable way without further compromising the well-being of the planet. They include goals such as ‘no poverty’, ‘zero hunger’ and ‘good health’. Things it would be hard to deny are important.
The catchily titled ‘Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (also known as IPBES, thankfully) has recognised that nature and wildlife are essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. But they also state that current trends in increasing habitat loss and extinctions could render many of the goals – including the ‘big ones’ relating to poverty, hunger, and health – unachievable. On a more positive note, they also state that nature is declining less rapidly in regions managed by indigenous people. Allowing local communities to take on more management decisions and empowering them to have a say about wildlife really could save the world.
Changing perceptions of people may not be enough, though – especially not in a country like Botswana where there are, undoubtedly, a lot of elephants. A lot is not the same thing as ‘too many’, but we will get to that.
Delineating parks and reserves – by fences, or with other boundaries such as settlements, agricultural lands and infrastructure – can restrict the movement and natural dispersal of wildlife in general and elephants in particular. And when elephants are confined, even in large areas, they do visibly change the habitat, reducing tree cover and diversity, for example, as they pull down and debark trees to feed upon. Culling emerged as the management tool of choice for many elephant range states – particularly in southern Africa – to prevent such ‘damage’ by keeping elephant numbers within ranges that people decided were acceptable.
In Kruger National Park, management decided that the land could not reasonably sustain more than 7,000 elephants, because the damage being done to vegetation in certain areas by elephants was deemed extensive. This was based upon the findings of a vegetation study conducted in the mid-1960s, which concluded: ‘When the point is reached when elephant biomass for the entire park reaches the generally accepted carrying capacity for elephant (one elephant per square mile), the utilisation rate [of woody species] will have reached dangerous proportions.’
However, these inferences were based on the assumption that the woody vegetation present in the 1960s provided an accurate representation of a ‘natural savannah’. But historically low numbers of elephants (and other large herbivores), due to excessive hunting, likely resulted in much greater woody cover than would have been present prior to European settlement. Furthermore, the decision to implement population management was also made at a time when rainfall was below average for five successive years. From 1967 up to 1994, 14,629 elephants were euphemistically ‘removed’ from Kruger.
Culling was suspended in 1994 whilst a comprehensive review was conducted, and essentially banned in 2006, on the grounds that other management options would be more effective. You see, every time after a cull had taken place, the growth rates of the population shot up to around 6.5 per cent (very close to the maximal rate), with intervals between calf births often going as low as three years for many females. People would kill elephants, opening up space in the ecosystem for more elephants, so the elephants would respond by having more calves.
Eventually, policymakers heard the shouts from various scientists, and decided to listen to their explanations of why this baby boom kept happening. Being located in a naturally dry area and yet attracting a lot of tourists who wanted to view wildlife, the management of Kruger had, over the years, opened a number of artificial water sources. These provided excellent viewing opportunities for visitors, and also meant that animals such as elephants, who need a lot of water, didn’t have to move very far in the dry season as they otherwise would have – they could hang around these artificial water points drinking to their heart’s content.
By discouraging normal elephant movement and concentrating a lot of elephants in these water-provisioned areas, the vegetation around these water points – within a mile or two radius – was being completely hammered. But the elephants were happy, as they had enough food and water to breed at high rates.
Policymakers eventually decided that instead of direct management of numbers – culling – managing access to resources could be a better option. So, many of these artificial water points have been closed since 2006, and elephant birth rates have slowed. The total number of elephants in the park has increased without the high death rates – now standing at around 18,000 individuals – but the elephants are more spread out over the entire park area, reducing the pressure on vegetation in any one space.
Whilst debates about culling continue to rumble on in southern Africa, with some trigger-happy ‘diehards’ (excuse the pun) still claiming it is necessary, and the best solution to reduce the ‘too many elephants’ they keep seeing, all the scientific evidence points towards natural resource management being a better long-term strategy. Elephants do have an impact on tree structure and abundance in Kruger and other large protected areas, but this does not necessarily reduce habitat quality for other wildlife, so there is no need to try to lower elephant numbers artificially. And science seems to be winning out with policymakers, on this issue at least, with culling becoming rarer and rarer.
Moreover, natural resource management avoids the very unattractive side effects of culling, such as having to kill entire families, including calves, or – to some people’s minds the worse option – intentionally raising juvenile elephants as orphans. You’ll remember that the crazily hormonal adolescent males of Pilanesberg were Kruger-cull orphans. And the female orphans did not come out of this unscathed. Recent experiments demonstrated that the social trauma experienced by young females who witnessed the culling of adult family members resulted in greatly compromised social functioning decades later.
Unlike the ‘natural’ family groups in Amboseli, which have not experienced such profound disruption, the adult female elephants in Pilanesberg – all of whom were Kruger-cull orphans – failed to distinguish other family groups appropriately and to assess the level of social threat that they presented. Their social knowledge and functioning were disrupted into adulthood, which could have major impacts on their behaviour and calf-rearing strategies. In fact, some people liken the effects of elephant calves witnessing the culls of their mothers and aunts to post-traumatic stress disorder: the effects of the early trauma certainly do seem to persist long-term.
Managing water points in Kruger has been deemed a success, because it has changed the space use and density of elephants across the landscape. But ultimately, the elephants are still constricted within a park. Admittedly a vast one, but villages, towns, roads, railway lines and fences still restrict and define where the elephants can move. Across many elephant range states, fencing is about the most common and obvious method to mitigate conflict – keeping elephants inside a reserve, and people out. But these fences also isolate elephant populations, curtailing their connectivity, and possibly leading to degradation of the habitat – as is the case in many of South Africa’s smaller fenced reserves.
Also, as genuinely ‘elephant-proof’ fences are pretty hard to come by, breakouts can occur that damage infrastructure and further contribute to the conflict narrative. Even in the absence of fences, elephants seem to know where protected areas end, and so where they become more vulnerable. Data from GPS tracking collars on elephants across the continent shows that, currently, elephants often streak through these unsafe areas as fast as they can, in the search for more secure habitats. Analysis of stress hormones in their dung tells us they are very stressed as they do it.
The best solution to all of this – in fact, the best solution to almost all ‘elephant problems’ – is the creation of ‘mega-parks’. Essentially, this means connecting up the remaining elephant habitat via the use of corridors and forming ‘transfrontier conservation agreements’, allowing the historic connections and dispersal patterns of elephants to become re-established.
We know that as the number of humans increases, elephants want to move away to areas where the human density is lower. However, moving away requires both the land to move along, and land to move to. At present, many elephant pathways between feeding areas or neighbouring populations are themselves blocked, being populated with humans or our infrastructure, and so conflict ensues.
Often, these blockages occur quite innocently, simply because the people moving in did not realise the land was important for wildlife movements: it can require years of animal tracking data to identify areas as corridors – literally, strips of land of varying width, depending on the country and habitat – that allow animals to move between key habitats and ranges. But even if the intent was not malicious, the effect is equally damaging.
The Amboseli ecosystem stretches far beyond the national park boundaries, across an international border into Tanzania, as far north-west as Nairobi National Park, and east to the Chyulu hills and beyond. But expanding agriculture and human settlements have significantly narrowed many of the corridors that were previously used by Amboseli elephants. Of eight identified corridors, two have been blocked entirely, three are in danger of being blocked, and only one is formally protected, making the ecosystem and elephant population vulnerable.
Identifying, reinstating, and preserving corridors will have significant impacts. Corridors can allow elephants to move to new areas to find water and food, and so reduce the feeding pressure on any one area. They can allow males to find new females to mate with, and so maintain genetic diversity and viability. And, crucially, they can allow elephants to move away from humans – and so reduce instances of conflict. The corridors themselves may not offer much in the way of food or water, but they offer highways to other areas of good habitat.
Opening up corridors and connecting ‘mega-parks’ does not mean removing all fences. Many fences will be necessary. For example, in Botswana, beef exports make a significant contribution to the economy, and beef cattle have to be kept separate from wildlife for import into Europe, to prevent the spread of diseases. But better planning of where fences and boundaries lie, and where elephants can and cannot move, could go a long way to alleviating the pressures of HEC.
The location of corridors is key. If they run past lots of smallholder farms, elephant raiding will continue. It is even possible that some people will need to be relocated. Not in the style of old, but sensitively, voluntarily, and with appropriate compensation and incentives offered – such as funding to build better housing and new schools.
Assuming that collaborations between all affected parties can be achieved, corridors and mega-parks really do seem like the only way to go. Allowing elephants to disperse and move naturally, recolonising areas that they currently cannot access, whilst at the same time allowing the people they live alongside to be involved in the decision-making and funding processes – this can all help address the central causes of human–elephant conflict.
If elephants can disperse, we will soon see a reduction in density in the areas that are currently highly populated. The elephants in Botswana are increasingly moving into areas more densely populated with humans, not because they like people, but because they need to move to areas with adequate food and water. Opening corridors to areas with similar food and water but fewer people would be in everyone’s interest. It may sound fanciful, but such areas do still exist, and the southern African range states are genuinely trying to achieve such mega-parks and safe corridors.
Botswana is working closely with Angola, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to enhance the ‘Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area’, or KAZA – which across its extent is home to more than half of the continent’s remaining elephants. The hope is that improvements across the KAZA area will pull elephants out of the densely populated areas of Botswana and Zimbabwe, into suitable habitat in Angola and Zambia. Remember, many of the elephants in Botswana probably originated from Angola, moving to escape the civil war and high poaching rates.
If habitat in Angola can be secured, and safe corridors provided, I think the majority of elephant scientists would agree that the elephants will move back. The movement may take some time, but it will be a long-term solution, reducing all the pressures on the areas that currently feel they have too many elephants. If safe passage and protection can be assured.
There is the strange tale of the elephants of South Sudan. In 2011, after thirty years of civil war, elephant populations had been virtually decimated due to poaching and hunting to sustain the various armies that roved the plains and swamps. Locals said that the elephants had ‘gone south’ into Uganda or DRC. Then, as soon as the fighting ended, within ten days there were reports that elephants had crossed back into the country. Quite how they ‘knew’ the war had ended, nobody is sure, but somehow the first curious bull elephants had gone exploring, reported back, and now some breeding herds have returned – at least temporarily.
So as long as we don’t allow killing rates to spiral out of control and learn appropriate ways to share land, elephant populations still have a good chance of rebounding.
A transfrontier conservation area is also being managed across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique: the Greater Limpopo TFCA. This initiative has removed international boundary fences that used to separate Kruger National Park from Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe and Limpopo National Park in Mozambique, and now incorporates many additional adjacent protected areas, allowing inter-connectivity and movement between large but formerly isolated elephant populations.
Even if conflict with humans was not such a pressing problem, the creation of such mega-parks and corridors would still be vitally important for the continued survival of savannah elephants – as a means of buffering against the effects of climate change. Southern Africa is home to the largest populations of savannah elephants, but these southern ranges are the most vulnerable to future droughts, with the climate in many areas already becoming drier.
This will place greater strain on the elephant populations, vegetation, and water resources in these areas. And if the elephants cannot disperse widely and seek out new water sources, then destruction and death to elephants, plants, and people could spiral out of control.
Scaling up this trend in creating mega-parks that link and reconnect elephant habitats means that the high elephant numbers we discussed earlier as being possible, could become a reality – and without necessarily increasing conflicts. In essence, elephants want to eat, drink, and avoid people. Connecting the habitat areas can allow them to do that, as long as the reserves and corridors are well managed – with conservation and sustainable economic development aims given equal precedence.
Perhaps, too, we should stop using the word conflict, and instead talk about human–elephant overlap; after all it’s their land too, and it’s hardly a fair fight.