How Many Elephants Are There?
The answer is complex but important. First, most conservation policies and activities revolve around numbers and the trends in numbers over time and across space. Second, people’s obsession with numbers and statistics is real. A reasonable number of elephants calms society, but if the figure is considered too high or too low, it elicits anxiety or is disregarded. Third, wildlife management focuses on numbers. Animal numbers and their changes inform decisions on protecting, harvesting, increasing or reducing numbers to ‘acceptable’ levels.
Poaching rates may have declined between 2012 and 2017. Nevertheless, an assessment following the Great Elephant Census published in 2016 suggests numbers shrunk by eight per cent per year between 2008 and 2014, mainly due to illegal killing for ivory. This onslaught is spreading, and there are concerns that some populations could crash within a decade or less. On the other hand, continuing and relatively low levels of poaching give the impression of apparent stability in elephant populations that otherwise should increase underprevailing ecological conditions.
HOW MANY SAVANNA ELEPHANTS CAN THERE BE?
At CERU, we made a painstaking effort to model how many elephants there could be. We based our modelling on estimates of the published size of elephant populations across 73 large, protected areas. The model suggests a deficit of nearly 78 per cent, primarily due to poaching. In two cases we couldn’t detect a deficit for northern Botswana or Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Putting a number to this suggests there should be at least 800,000 more elephants in the 73 protected areas than the 370,000 estimated in 2015. Most of the populations we assessed comprised less than a quarter of the number of elephants that could be sustained ecologically by the protected areas in which they live.
Some practitioners are worried that the apparent high population growth in isolated populations will eventually result in elephants harming protected areas. Their concern is valid, as populations in such circumstances cannot benefit from dispersal, which reduces population size and growth locally and negates potential adverse effects on protected areas. The solution for this problem continues to reside in enabling dispersal through connectivity.
The declines in several buffer areas are of concern. People live in these areas, and although poaching is responsible for the dip in elephant numbers, these trends may also be due to them moving away from areas where they are ill-treated to find shelter in core protected areas. The conversion of land for agricultural purposes also plays a role. Nevertheless, across southern Africa, 50 per cent of elephants live in core protected areas where their numbers are increasing or are stable. This certainly is good to know, and efforts to protect these elephants must continue and be supported by society. We must not lose sight of the fact that about 45 per cent of elephants in this region live in buffer areas – they need nurturing to reduce population declines.
