Sharing the Future
The United Nations predicts that the global human population will soar to somewhere near eleven or twelve billion people by the end of the century. It’s a terrifying thought if you consider the impact we are already having on the planet, and what extra pressure an additional three or four billion people will have.
The threats to elephants are real and immense in the face of such challenges, and it is easy to become despondent and give up hope. Across the world we continue to turn a blind eye to the many injustices facing wildlife and allow terrible crimes against nature to be committed. Often, we ourselves are to blame; we choose the easy option and spend our time expressing faux outrage at a picture we see on social media, instead of doing anything meaningful. We might follow a charitable page and give it a like on social media, maybe we even donate a couple of pounds to a cause, but we carry on committing the same old crimes and fail to address the root causation of the issue.
Even for those who do make a change for the better, it’s hard not to feel like it’s a futile effort when up against the intractable rise of ‘development’ and the output of billions of people who simply want to survive. We know full well that beef farming and soy plantations in South America are causing the biggest environmental degradation, and yet there is little slow-down in consumption. We continue to use plastics and waste food and refuse to talk about the unsustainability of the human growth in the developing world for fear of hypocrisy or accusations of cultural superiority.
Well, unless we do address the elephant in the room, it will be too late to conserve our last giants. The problem is a global one, and we must all play our part to ensure that everyone can effect positive change.
Thankfully it’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to the numbers. The UN also predicts that when the inevitable growth reaches its peak in eighty years’ time, there will be a global slowdown as more people emerge out of poverty and better wealth distribution is enabled. Ultimately, the only way to reverse the process of unsustainability is to improve education across the board, by supporting emerging markets to redress the inequality through empowerment and wealth creation. In a nutshell, we need to work with the developing world to help them progress to a point at which they care. Education is the key to a more considerate, responsible and less reckless world.
I’d go one step further to state that it is in female education particularly that the balance of power hangs. There are 65 million girls out of school and 80 per cent of these girls live in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria, 5 million children aged six to eleven years old do not have access to primary education. And the average literacy rate in Nigeria among females is less than 50 per cent. Why? Well, there are practical factors such as distance to school, cost of education, transport, uniform and books, but also many girls are forced or obliged to stay at home to help with domestic work through religious and cultural pressure – simply because they are girls.
The Nigerian fertility rate is 5.7 births per woman, one of the highest in the world. Imagine, however, if the average Nigerian girl is encouraged and empowered to stay in school until she is eighteen, instead; by default she will reduce her number of children by at least one or two before the age of twenty-five. What’s more, she will be more educated, and rather than stay at home producing yet more children, she will be more likely to get a job and be informed to make her own choices; to have a say in her own culture and go on to implement greater societal change across her country. Her children will do the same.
If we can do this across Africa, then in one generation great change can be achieved. So, if we are to focus our efforts on something, then we need to start investing in anything that keeps girls in school longer, and that encourages employment and hope. By this logic we also should invest in healthcare, which reduces the societal desire to pump out endless children.
Bill and Melinda Gates run a philanthropic organisation that has spent billions of dollars to save the lives of millions of children in extreme poverty by investing in primary healthcare and education. Yet they come under constant attack from well-meaning people who say, ‘If you keep saving poor children, you’ll kill the planet by causing overpopulation.’
Of course, there is an inherent moral imperative to save dying children, but more than that we need to do everything we can to reduce child mortality, not only as an act of humanity for living, suffering children, but also to benefit the whole world now and in the future. Why? Because as counterintuitive as it sounds, the more children that are saved now, the faster population growth will slow down in the long run. As billions of people are emerging out of absolute poverty, most of them are deciding to have fewer children of their own accord.
People in the ‘developing world’ have quickly realised that they no longer need such large families to provide child labour on farms. And as healthcare increases, they no longer need extra children as insurance against child mortality. As women and men get educated, they start to want better-educated and better-fed children, and the answer is not to have so many. Quality over quantity. This is helped greatly by the availability of modern contraceptives, which let millions of parents have fewer children without having less sex.
Voluntary family planning is one of the most cost-effective investments a country can make in its future. Every dollar spent on family planning can save governments up to six dollars, which can be then be spent on improving health, housing, water, sanitation, and other public services, and of course – conservation.
Only the poorest 10 per cent of the global population now have more than five children. The rest of us are choosing to have fewer and fewer, and in countries like Iran, Brazil and China, the average fertility rate is under two. That’s below the UK. Even in Afghanistan, where in 1995 the average woman had eight children, now, thanks almost exclusively to female education, it is down to 4.5 children.
When looking at this critical juncture in our history and the biggest challenges facing the planet, I think we have a moral imperative to help raise the average levels of education across the board, which in turn has the knock-on effect of reducing human population growth and its unsustainable side effects.
If the elephants are to stand any chance at all, we need to find a way that sustains the means of wealth production, by bringing more people out of poverty in order to save the environment, and ultimately, ourselves.
It is what we do right now, though, that matters in the short term. We need to promote better coexistence between elephants and humans; and coexistence is more common than we often realise, with many people living peacefully alongside elephants much of the time, across Africa and Asia. So let’s try and keep some hope alive.
There is a lot we can do to change things, from mitigating against crop raiding or damage on a local level, to opening up corridors connecting the areas where elephants live, to encouraging sustainable development for the people living alongside elephants, and putting pressure on the relevant policymakers to make sure ivory is off-limits. It all sounds so straightforward, doesn’t it?
Of course, things are rarely that simple in practice. All conservation plans we make must take wider economic, social, and ecological contexts into account, and things would be easier if we could predict the future. But one thing is straightforward: we have to act now to find solutions that work for both elephants and people.
Finding a way for people and wildlife to share land and resources is the ultimate conservation challenge. And given that we know elephant movement patterns are related to human activities, our conservation strategies must take account of the different socioeconomic contexts found across elephant range states. Conservation successes will continue to depend on sustainable human development; improving education, literacy rates, and good governance, whilst reducing corruption and inequality, are all crucial for protecting the natural world.
The immediate, most urgent threat to elephants remains poaching for ivory, but habitat loss and fragmentation are the long-term issues that we simply cannot disregard. Whilst anti-poaching enforcement and ivory-demand reduction strategies are therefore critical, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the habitat problem and dealing with only one issue at a time.
We have to tackle all threats concurrently and holistically. Lifting the communities in human–elephant overlap areas out of poverty, and encouraging their development in a sustainable, environmentally aware manner, will likely reduce the temptation to poach. It should also reduce the constant background calls to reopen the damaging legal ivory trade, as the need to raise national funds for conservation can be met in other ways.
So, we know what we are aiming for. But how on earth do we get there? I mean, eradicating global corruption and inequality seems like a pretty big task to heap onto the shoulders of a few conservationists. Like all things, I suppose, we have to take it one step at a time – with a broad consortium of conservationists, development organisations, government agencies, and civil society all working together.
Let’s assume, somewhat hopefully, but with a bit of evidence behind our faith, that anti-poaching and ivory-demand reduction strategies will continue, and that the ivory trade will wither and crumble. It may not happen entirely, but we need demand for ivory to drop to the point where elephant poaching falls dramatically. Permanently. There is a lot we can do at the same time to counteract local-scale conflict and wider habitat loss.
Achieving coexistence is never going to be as easy as drawing a line between humans and elephants: we do not and cannot live separately. There is no one solution that will eradicate conflict, but with a lot of patient research and trial-and-error learning, we do now have a range of measures that can be combined and adapted to discourage or prevent clashes between humans and elephants.
Crop raiding by elephants is not a new phenomenon, having been recorded as soon as Europeans brought certain crops to Africa, and probably occurring long before that, too. It has been suggested that the wide stone walls of ancient towns and villages in Zimbabwe, like those at the Great Zimbabwe ruins, were designed to deter elephants from raiding crops. So, there’s no stopping us using similar deterrents now – building defences to keep elephants away from whatever we need to defend, be it crops, water pumps, or houses.
We can grow ‘bio-fences’ of thick, thorny vegetation that elephants cannot easily pass through – like Palmyra palm, which is native to India and Southeast Asia; Agave, native to the Americas; and cacti. They can all serve to keep elephants at bay. Such bio-fences have add-on benefits, too, providing fruits or harvestable products. Agave species provide edible flowers, sugar-rich food from the leaf sap and sisal hemp fibres. (And if you need more convincing, tequila is also made from certain Agave species.) Bio-fences also capture carbon, reduce soil erosion, are resistant to extreme weather, and can act as wind and fire barriers, further protecting the people and other crops they encircle.
They will not offer immediate protection, obviously, requiring several years to grow to sizes that will deter elephants, but as part of a longer-term plan, they offer a low-maintenance, sustainable, and productive solution.
Whilst such bio-fences are growing, other barriers can be employed such as chilli fences or electric fences. Capsaicin in chilli irritates elephants’ eyes and very sensitive noses. Old rags covered in a home-made chilli paste – mixed from fresh chilli, tobacco, and grease – can be hung as ‘chilli curtains’ on any kind of fencing to deter elephants effectively.
Electric fences can also offer a good solution to keeping elephants at bay, but only if they are properly designed and maintained. For an account of the limitations of electric fences, read The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony. His elephants used to take advantage of lapses in power supply, and he even caught them throwing sticks at the fence wires as though testing whether the electricity was on or not. When they figured it out, they had no problem in pushing over trees to cause a short circuit.
Older elephants have even been seen to use the younger members of the herd to test electric fences by pushing them through them. And if the posts between wires do not have electrified outriggers – branches that poke forward toward the elephants – they can easily pull down a fence by pulling out the posts.
Some elephants have learnt that their tusks do not conduct electricity, and so blithely break electric wires with their tusks and then amble through. There are many rather tragic videos you can watch of this online – tragic because you are literally watching human–elephant conflict in action. Given the design and maintenance costs required, electric fences are often not the best solution for small-scale, subsistence-level farmers.
But one barrier method that is growing rapidly in popularity for small-scale farmers across Africa is beehive fences. Forget mice; giant, mighty elephants are instead afraid of the humble bee. To be fair, African honeybees are not to be underestimated. They are very aggressive, and the threat of being stung by a swarm of angry bees on the trunk, thin skin of the ears or genitals, or around the eyes, is enough to make elephants turn and flee.
The ‘Elephants and Bees Project’ supported by Save the Elephants shows that hanging purpose-built wooden hives on wire that links all around the crop or settlement to be protected is very effective at keeping elephants at bay. By nudging the wires as they try to enter a field, elephants disturb the hive and anger the bees – and elephants run away at the sound of angry bees. Their smell is a warning enough, so elephants avoid areas that have been sprayed with bee pheromones.
Keeping honeybees also provides an additional revenue source for the farmers, with ‘elephant-friendly honey’ proving to be very popular with local consumers. And of course, any profit can be used to maintain the beehive fences, providing a sustainable, self-sufficient solution.
People can also hang trip alarms around farms – essentially cowbells strung around on wires – to alert them when elephants are trying to enter the land. This allows people to run out and enact a range of different deterrents, using loud noises (whip-cracking, banging drums, firecrackers) or fire – including old rags dipped in kerosene and tied to the end of an aluminium chain that can be lit and swung around, creating the appearance of a fast-moving fireball, or setting fire to homemade ‘chilli bombs’ that release noxious chilli smoke.
This feels like a good place to stop and reflect for a moment. You heard me right; to defend their homes and maintain their food supplies, people have to go outside in the middle of the night, in darkness, to set off chilli bombs, bang drums, and wave fireballs around their heads. It’s worth remembering that, the next time you get stressed waiting in the supermarket queue.
As alien and frightening as these defences may sound to us, they are important, and they do make real, tangible differences to people’s lives. The Boteti river forms the western boundary of the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana, and people here tend to locate their fields close to the river, for ease of irrigation, with their houses being some distance away. This means elephants and hippos can easily cross over the river, to the farmland on the other side. In this arid area, subsistence-level farming was already tough, even before the elephants returned to Makgadikgadi, but there are times now when it can feel almost impossible.
The charity Elephants for Africa (EfA) are helping people enact a range of different defences against crop-raiding elephants and hippos, and one of their solutions has been to offer relatively low-cost tents, which allow people to sleep within their fields, so they can better protect their crops from any wildlife that may enter at night. The mere presence of being in the field may well be a deterrent, but it also ensures that they can tend to the mitigation tools they have, such as smoking dung and chilli bricks during the night.
One woman, Balongo, took up this solution with gusto. Over the course of one season, she slept in the tent in her field every night except for Easter, meaning she was able to react quickly any time she heard crop raiders approaching. Her crop yield increased so much, from a level where she had barely been able to feed herself and her children, to a point where she had enough money to build a storehouse in which to keep her extra crops.
The storehouse duly was constructed. But when the EfA team went to look at the storehouse, they were immediately concerned – there were hardly any crops inside. Worried, they asked what had happened. Had rats got in? Mould? Vervet monkeys? What had gone wrong?
Nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact. Word had spread that Balongo had extra food, and her storeroom had become a makeshift shop. Over the course of a couple of years, through her own dedication and hard work, she was able to grow and sell enough food to pay off all her debts, including to her children’s school for fees stretching back several years, and even their fees for a year in advance, ensuring that her daughters can continue with their education.
Similar success stories of simple mitigation methods changing the lives of individuals or communities can be found across elephant range states – usually wherever there are charities working together with local communities. The range of mitigation methods being tested and used is growing all the time, from simple things like WhatsApp groups to warn farmers across a spread-out area that elephants are approaching, to the high-tech use of drones to scare off elephants, which has recently been trialled in the Tarangire–Manyara and Serengeti areas of Tanzania.
But elephants do not make this work easy. They are very smart, and their cognitive abilities exacerbate the problem, as they can readily learn ways around many of our best defences. They may quickly realise that whilst they are unpleasant, loud noises, fireballs, and the smell of bees aren’t going to hurt them. They can learn where the weak spots in a fence are, or which farms are less actively defended, and they may even learn which people are really worth avoiding, and target those who are a bit less aggressive. So successful long-term mitigation against elephant damage requires considerable planning and strategising, and the combined use of a suite of different solutions, now called ‘intelligent farming’.
Intelligent farming begins with good land-use planning. The best start is grouping fields and resources together in a concentrated area, where the burden of guarding can be shared, and no one field is isolated and therefore especially vulnerable. Ideally, these areas need to be slightly removed from natural resources the elephants need to access, like water. And although access to the fields needs to be blocked, corridors to essential resources must be left open, because if an elephant is desperate to access water, no amount of fencing, drumming, or chilli is going to stop it!
The community area can be protected with a variety of defences – preferably more than one – including trenches (although these are only viable in areas not prone to flooding, as otherwise elephants could swim across), bio-fences, or chilli fences. A buffer zone of clear, open land or low-growing crops that elephants find unpalatable, such as onions, placed between natural savannah habitat and the community farm is a good idea, as the further elephants have to travel in the open, the more reticent they become – and it allows guards more time to see the elephants approaching. It also helps to define the permissible range boundary for the elephants, helping them learn where is and is not safe to range.
These local-scale defences are important to individuals, but are also crucial for the long-term success of bigger conservation projects. In 2004, the Gregory C. Carr Foundation signed an agreement with the government of Mozambique to work together on the Gorongosa Restoration Project. This ‘collaborative management partnership’ has been hugely successful in rebuilding and protecting Gorongosa National Park; trees have been planted and bird and mammal populations are recovering. Tourism revenue is increasing, while education, health, reforestation, and employment schemes are having real impacts in the surrounding communities.
Yet this fantastic progress is being threatened by the very elephants the park protects. The rebounding elephant population, a huge success story of Gorongosa, could sour relations dramatically, as some of the animals raid crops of people living in the buffer zones around the park. The principles of intelligent farming are now being employed to try to limit these conflicts, and make sure that elephants do not unknowingly undo all the good work that has been done for conservation and local communities. Importantly, plans are afoot to expand the extent of the park by opening corridors that will eventually stretch all the way to the coast.
In fact, with its anti-poaching patrols, conflict mitigation schemes, balanced land-use planning, community development programmes (which include programmes aimed specifically at educating girls and involving women in conservation) and plans to open up wildlife corridors, Gorongosa represents practically the best of everything we can do to secure a place for elephants in the world. It is the kind of project that can only inspire hope, showing us how nature can be restored and conserved, and used to develop and uplift communities sustainably.
Arguably the most vital element in the success of Gorongosa so far lies in the relationship the park and restoration project is fostering with the people. Local communities are involved as key stakeholders, including becoming rangers in the park; Mozambican scientists and managers hold key leadership positions; and the role of women is being especially promoted, as the need for their input is increasingly being recognised. Giving women a seat at the negotiating table during peace talks attempting to end armed conflicts results in much better outcomes – they are 64 per cent less likely to fail, and peace is 35 per cent more likely to still be holding fifteen years later! That’s a pretty staggering improvement.
In general, higher levels of gender equality are associated with lower conflict rates both within and between states. Likewise, educating girls, promoting women’s health issues, and involving them in planning and implementation is only going to improve conservation prospects.
It is not that women have all the answers necessarily – not all the time, anyway – but that women often bring a different perspective, due to having different kinds of interaction with elephants. After all, it is often women or children in Africa who collect the water for households, and water sources can be a prime source of conflict with elephants. Taking account of all sides and hearing all voices should ultimately result in more comprehensive and viable plans.
To give us even more reason to be optimistic, Gorongosa is not alone in these successes. Other collaborative management partnerships are showing equally positive signs of impact, across Africa. The Gonarezhou Conservation Trust in Zimbabwe, a partnership between Frankfurt Zoological Society and Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, is successfully protecting the region’s elephants and rejuvenating the area. And as part of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area mega-park, securing Gonarezhou (which means ‘place of elephants’ in the local Shona language) is particularly important, as it will allow safe movement of elephants over vast areas between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
African Parks, of which Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, is the president, is another organisation that has set up partnerships to manage numerous protected areas across Africa. These are now offering safe habitat for elephants in Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, DRC, Malawi, and Rwanda – many of the areas worst hit by poaching, in fact, as well as education, employment, and tourism revenue for local communities.
It is not only large organisations that are making important differences. Low-budget projects are also achieving a huge amount in localised areas. Staff at the Mali Elephant Project, which works to protect the remnant desert-adapted elephant population in the country’s Gourma region, realised that although local people were concerned by elephants crop raiding or blocking their entrance to forests, they overwhelmingly wanted to conserve them. People were worried that losing elephants must mean their environment was degraded, and they did not want that to be the case.
The Project works with local communities, encouraging and empowering them to devise their own sustainable-resource management systems based on their local cultural knowledge, which allows natural resources to be shared between people and elephants, not competed over. Not a single elephant has been lost to poaching in the region for two years, and households participating in trials of their livelihood schemes – which involve actions such as marketing wild fruits and medicinal plants, and rearing only a few fat cattle instead of a large herd of thin ones – resulted in an average 400-per-cent increase in household income! That is a truly momentous achievement.
In the northern tip of the remote and rugged Matthews Mountain Range of Kenya, not far from the turquoise wonder of Lake Turkana, the Milgis Trust is likewise promoting peaceful coexistence between elephants and the local Samburu people. This is a region entirely outside of protected areas and with no fencing in sight. By employing community scouts, building schools, funding clinics, and installing boreholes to access water, and mostly by educating people about elephants, tolerance has increased and fear decreased. The number of elephants in the area is on the rise, while poaching and conflict have decreased substantially.
Importantly, the community view these increasing elephant numbers as a blessing. Education, development, and social participation have been key, yet again. Of course, it is not only rural communities who can have problems with elephants. Many reserve managers – especially in fenced or comparatively small reserves – are concerned about elephants damaging trees, particularly iconic baobabs or marula trees, for example, or overfeeding on vegetation and so degrading the habitat. Many solutions in South Africa are being adopted to protect individual trees – hanging beehive fences, or packing sharp rocks at the base of trees to prevent elephants from approaching them too closely. The best solution for any kind of damage or overuse is usually to allow dispersal of elephants by opening up corridors and encouraging mega-parks. Now is the time to encourage the opening of corridors and linking of parks like never before, to give elephants the ability to move. Away from us.
Improving the connectivity of elephant habitat can be achieved in some surprising ways. In Kenya, underpasses are increasingly being used to allow elephants – and all other wildlife – to move safely under roads or railway tracks that have been built through their habitats.
Around Mount Kenya, a busy highway had effectively split the habitat for many years, and left elephants and motorists vulnerable to high-speed collisions. An underpass was built and completed in late 2013, with the first pioneer young bulls using it to cross under the road a few weeks later. It is now used routinely by many males and family groups, reconnecting the Mount Kenya elephant population that had formerly been split – about 2,000 individuals had been stuck on the mountain above the road, and 5,000 in the forests and plains below the road.
Similar underpasses have also been incorporated into the new railway line that connects Nairobi with Mombasa, which runs through Tsavo East National Park. It is hoped that these underpasses will prevent or limit wildlife deaths from train collisions in the park, and it’s a good example of how a bit of creative thinking and awareness at the design and planning stages of our ever-expanding infrastructure projects can help reduce the environmental threats.
Funding corridors and underpasses is not straightforward, and often relies on external donors. Corridors can be especially tricky, as large tracts of land may need to be purchased or leased. But leasing degraded lands from communities and restoring them to natural habitats for wildlife ticks so many boxes that we cannot simply file the idea away under the ‘too difficult and complicated’ category. One important wildlife corridor that radiates west out of Amboseli National Park is kept open because conservation agencies pay an annual fee to the landowners. Alternatively, landowners have become inclined to convert land to corridors themselves, when such areas could act as conservancies that attract tourists.
Farmers could even be encouraged to share important dispersal lands with elephants – whilst maintaining their existing farming activities in a more concentrated area – with direct payments. Whereas compensation schemes only pay out if damage has occurred, here farmers are rewarded for sharing land, allowing elephants and wildlife to pass through it. The guaranteed income could offset any crop losses the farmers may endure, and allow them to invest in well-designed mitigation methods.
But yes, all of this needs money. So far, conservation finance in many elephant range states relies heavily on tourism and cash injections from rich philanthropists or charitable organisations. As you have probably noticed, many if not all of the most successful projects promoting coexistence are being planned, funded and implemented by non-governmental charities, and often at very small, local scales. It is time governments stepped up to implement these schemes on national scales across the continent.
We need international governments to talk sensibly about what is needed and what each can contribute to support elephant range states tangibly and practically in meeting their conservation and development needs. The unique natural heritage of Africa must be included in discussions of socio-economic development.
Economic growth, sustainable development, and nature conservation are not conflicting aims. They must be linked, and education and social stability are central to achieving this. People around the world should be encouraged to understand the importance of nature; and improved governance, decreased corruption, and better education can give people the support to remain tolerant even of species that can be problematic at times. But ultimately, it will all come down to money. Which means that political will is essential.
Habitat that supports elephants could be viewed as a ‘global public good’, given that the entire world benefits from its continued existence. International levies, whereby countries contribute a fixed percentage of funding to relieve some of the financial burden put on individual elephant range states and non-government organisations, is therefore one funding avenue. The reality of this kind of plan may feel like a long way off, but similar schemes were designed as part of the Paris Climate Agreement, to help fund the implementation of climate-change initiatives in developing nations.
Extending such schemes to cover nature conservation and biodiversity protection should not be beyond reach, especially as securing biodiversity contributes significantly to carbon capture and achieving climate targets. Nature – and elephants – are necessary for a healthy world.
What it all requires, to ensure we can live peacefully alongside elephants from now on, are changes made by us. We must adapt first, make concessions, and create solutions that allow elephants to fit in again. People are key, but in all this planning and discussion, we must never lose sight of the elephants – of their unique biology, their social and spatial requirements, and their long lives lived among family and friends.
We must respect these relationships and make sure that all our management and conservation schemes of the future do not fracture their associations. We must learn from our mistakes and not repeat the wrongs of the past. Elephants need space to move and associate with who they want, when they want. That is something we must accept and learn to live with if elephants are to survive.
None of the necessary actions are easy, they may require difficult decisions and innovative solutions, but globally we are making more and more pro-environmental decisions, and there are many reasons to be optimistic. The elephant losses we have witnessed can be halted, conflict can be eased, and coexistence can be achieved. Corridors and mega-parks can be secured, facilitating natural dispersal and balance and allowing elephant numbers to recover; and people living alongside elephants can be raised out of poverty, valuing the nature they live alongside.
I say all this can be done, because I am hopeful. But if it doesn’t happen, the last giants will become extinct in the very near future.
We owe it to them, and ourselves, not to let this happen.