Only the south remains for African elephants

In Botswana, at the southern tip of Africa, there are about 130,000 elephants. In neighboring Zimbabwe, another 82,000. In Namibia, Zambia and South Africa there are, combined, another 60,000. That sounds like a lot, but the African elephant is disappearing. A study using data from 1964 published in the scientific journal PNAS shows how in most of the continent, populations of pachyderms have shrunk, surviving only in protected areas.

The reduction has been most dramatic among forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis), which have disappeared from most of their habitat. Meanwhile, the savannah species (Loxodonta africana), the most numerous, has already become extinct from almost the entire Sahel and has reduced its presence by up to 70%. Only in the south does it seem to be holding on. When these data are combined with those of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), also in danger of extinction, the future of the largest land animal on the planet becomes darker.

Counting elephants is not easy. Those in the forest have to be carefully sought out, sometimes estimating their number based on their droppings. Those in the savannah, given the enormous distances they usually travel, are counted from the air. There are other indirect methods of estimating their population, such as the number of recovered carcasses or the tons of ivory seized in places as far away as Hong Kong (28 tons seized in 2014) or the United Arab Emirates (10 tons in 2015 alone).

Now a group of scientists has turned to these and other databases, some of which were started in the 1960s, still in the colonial period, to detect how the different populations of African pachyderms have fared. The objective was not to determine how many there were and how many remain; the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) does that periodically in its reports. What they were looking for was to see the evolution of the elephants’ population density. In the words of Nelson Mandela University conservation ecologist and co-author of the study, Dave Barfour, they wanted to “quantitatively develop an assessment of continental elephant population trends in a formal model.” A model that can be used further, valid for viewing evolution over time.

And the trend is dramatic. With data from 1964-2016 taken from 475 areas in the 37 countries where elephants were found, the new study not only shows the decline in the population density of these giant animals, but also how quickly they are disappearing: in these 52 years, during the time when ecological awareness and conservation science have developed, up to 96% of African forest elephant populations have lost numbers. In regions of Gabon or the Central African Republic, many of them have disappeared completely. So far this century, in Gabon, whose forests barely make up 12% of Africa’s total forested regions but which were home to more than half of the population of this species, up to 20,000 elephants have died since the beginning of the century, according to IUCN data.

The fate of the savannah elephant has not been any better in most of the continent. In the Sahel region, immediately south of the Sahara, elephant populations have been decimated. In countries such as Chad, there are barely a few hundred left. In the east of the continent, where there are protected areas made famous by documentaries, such as the Masai Mara complex, the Serengeti, and the Ngorongoro conservation area, between Kenya and Tanzania, there are still several thousand of these proboscideans. But it is the second region where density has decreased the most, with only 10% of the populations having increased their numbers. Overall, the population decline stands at 70% in half a century, a period shorter than the life expectancy of these animals, which can live to be 70 years old.

That percentage is not higher because in the extreme south of the continent the trend has been exactly the opposite: up to 42% of the populations have seen their density increase. In countries such as Botswana, which is home to the largest population of savannah elephants, the problem is how to solve the continuous conflicts between the animals and an expanding human population. Regarding the success in the south, the scientific director of Save the Elephants and senior author of this research, George Wittemyer, stresses that it is a very complex issue, but it would be the result of “a combination of good conservation governance, incentives for conservation, and more available habitat.”

Although it does not fall within the timeframe of this study, it is estimated that a century ago there were between three and five million elephants spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The latest IUCN report, from 2016, was the first to recognize the existence of two different species in Africa, the forest species and the savannah species. It was also the first to classify the latter as endangered and the former as critically endangered. The report puts the number of those remaining that year at 415,000 (plus another 125,000 in areas not yet systematically studied). How did 90% of those three to five million disappear? Trophy hunting during the colonial period was partly to blame. But after World War II and the decolonization process, human demographic expansion and the advance of agriculture needed to feed this explosive population growth took over.

Now, as Nelson Mandela University researcher Balfour says, “the main cause of the current population decline is illegal hunting, almost always for ivory.” This material, which is nothing more than dentin, has always been appreciated by different cultures, including in Europe. But it was not until the 1980s that the illegal trade in ivory exploded. Since then, thousands and thousands of elephants have been killed to have their tusks removed to meet the growing demand from the Gulf countries and, above all, from China. In fact, there are studies that have linked the emergence of the Chinese middle-class after the liberalization of state communism with the increase in ivory trafficking. The impact is such that even nature, through this artificial selection, is favoring the emergence of generations of tuskless pachyderms.

A comparison of the two most recent IUCN reports from 2016 and 2007 underlines the speed at which elephants are heading toward extinction. Over that decade, Africa lost 118,000 pachyderms. Most of the decline has occurred in the populations of Kenya and Tanzania, again due to ivory poaching. The distribution across large regions illustrates the underlying causes of the decline. The south of the continent is home to 70% of elephants and the east another 20%. The west, the area with the highest human population density, and central Africa, share the remaining 10%, mostly forest elephants.

The situation is no better for the Asian elephant. Once ranging from present-day Iraq to southern China, the latest IUCN status report painted a future as bleak as that of the African elephant. In the lifetime of an elephant, its population has been halved and it has lost more than 50% of its habitat. Looking at distribution maps, the enormous fragmentation of the rest is obvious. There are populations in 13 countries, from Sri Lanka to the eastern tip of Indonesia. But when you put them on the map, most are isolated from each other. Other data reinforce its status as endangered, with some subspecies, such as the Sumatran elephant, in critical condition: The Sri Lankan population has been reduced by 20% since 1960; in the Chinese province of Yunnan, there are only a third of the pachyderms that existed in 1975.

So far this century, the greatest losses have occurred in countries relatively isolated from global modernization processes, such as Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. In 2018, the most recent year for which data are available, there were a maximum of 51,000 elephants left in Asia, down from 100,000 a century ago. Although there are still perhaps a little more than half a million elephants on the planet, these animals have low birth rates and long breeding periods, which aggravates the acceleration of the decline. In a note from Colorado State University, where he is a professor, Wittemyer said the results of the population study “highlight the speed with which even something as large and visible as elephants can disappear.”

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