By Vanessa Bauza
August 12, 2024
World Elephant Day: 3 stories to catch up on
4 min
Elephants have a profound impact on people and nature.
Known as “ecosystem engineers,” they travel vast distances, carving new paths through dense brush and spreading seeds that restore forests. They’re also a lifeline for local economies, driving millions in tourism revenue where other opportunities are scarce.
Conservation International works with local communities and other partners to protect and restore the lands that both people and elephants need to thrive. On this World Elephant Day, Conservation News shares three recent stories that explore the intertwined fates of rural communities, elephants and the nature they rely on.
“The greatest enemy of the environment will always be poverty,” says Conservation International fellow Greta Iori. “Someone who is hungry or poor will be left with no choice but to poach or to compete with wildlife for resources — often knowing that they are essentially harming themselves in the long term.”
Iori’s perspective reflects a decade of experience working with the Elephant Protection Initiative to prevent human-elephant conflict. Her guiding philosophy is that saving Africa’s elephants requires understanding and supporting rural communities that share spaces with them. In short, she says, people and wildlife can only prosper together.
“I love elephants; my work is all about protecting them,” she says. “And that means seeing the conflict from both sides — starting with meeting people’s basic human needs and addressing issues of inequality. Then the pressure on wildlife is reduced.”
Iori spoke with Conservation News about the realities of living alongside elephants, misconceptions about poachers, and the relationship between poverty and conservation.
It’s the first large-scale look at how climate change could affect the relationship between people and pachyderms.
Unsurprisingly, study projections show that climate change and agricultural expansion will lead to greater conflict — furthering human encroachment on elephants’ habitats and making competition for scarce resources even fiercer.
Yet that future is not set in stone, said Mia Guarnieri, the study’s lead author. While the study highlights the need for greater climate and biodiversity action, perhaps more critically, it maps the areas at greatest risk of increasing conflict.
“If we understand where conflict is likely to occur,” she says, “we can better prepare for it.”
According to a study co-led by Hawkins, one answer lies in bringing wildlife back to the grassy ecosystems they have helped shape for millennia. For example, large herbivores like elephants, which maintain savannas by trampling trees and clearing dense vegetation, are disappearing. The result is that too many trees are outcompeting grasses — reducing food for wild and domestic grazers, depleting groundwater, and drying up streams.
Hawkins spoke with Conservation News about how “wilder” lands benefit communities and climate — and what it will take to get there.
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