Challenges
Africa’s wildlife face critical threats
Africa’s wildlife, including elephants, face complex, interconnected threats that need innovative and sustainable solutions. If habitat loss, fragmentation, climate change, and poaching rates continue, Africa’s elephants and many other species risk extinction.
Fragmented landscapes
Broken landscapes have devastating impacts on roaming animals like elephants. Increasingly they find their home ranges cut off by new villages, farms, cities, highways, or industrial growth, including mining.
When judiciously placed, fences can play a positive role in protecting people and wildlife. But they can also negatively impact elephants, sometimes entangling and injuring them and forcing them to travel longer distances for food and water. Wire fences also provide poachers with the material used to trap wildlife, although such behaviour is less likely where conservation and communities share common goals.
Land where elephants once foraged is now planted with food for human use, while villagers and farmers increasingly block access to water needed for their livestock and crops.
Fragmentation also happens when marginalised communities are pushed into small patches of land with nowhere to expand. Meanwhile, businesses, wealthier elites, and other more powerful individuals grab land for their own economic benefit. Frequently, poor households hold few options regarding the tenure of their land as they face destitution and ruin due to climate change and other factors.
Poverty and poor governance (including the lack of adequate investment in alternative livelihood opportunities) exacerbate the problem, limiting options for households needing to generate extra income. Adding a further burden, exhausted land due to poor agricultural practices forces farmers to open new land when what is indeed required is improved farm management techniques.
Conflict and poaching
Human-wildlife conflict is a constant risk when wild animals and people live close together. The most common forms are crop raiding (when wildlife eats or destroys crops), property destruction, or simply people and wildlife getting too close and triggering defensive behaviours that may lead to injury or death of either party. Such encounters foster resentment against wildlife, which is seen as a potentially dangerous nuisance and often killed.
Wild animals like elephants face constant threats from poaching gangs funded by international criminal networks exploiting a global demand for ivory and other products. Male and female elephants are slaughtered for their tusks, but when females are killed, the tragedy is heightened—often, they leave behind calves, many of which fail to survive. Every elephant death drives the species closer to a point of no return.
Climate change
As global temperatures rise, rainfall patterns fluctuate, and weather patterns change, many wild species struggle to adapt. Some face extinction, particularly those already under pressure due to habitat loss, fragmentation, hunting, and other human activities.
Food and water insecurity often ensue, forcing wild animals to explore new areas in search of water and forage where they may encounter humans and the risk of conflict. Extreme weather events are growing increasingly frequent and severe. Disasters like droughts, heatwaves, storms, floods, and fires are seldom out of the news and have increasingly harsh impacts on ecosystems and the wild animals they harbour. Deaths and large-scale die-offs are often tragic consequences.
Inadequate conservation funding
The massive gap in financing conservation initiatives is a serious underlying obstacle to protecting biodiversity and nature. Indisputably, natural ecosystems are critical in removing carbon, filtering water, providing productive soil, pollinating, and protecting people from disaster. The economic value of nature is vast. It is worth nearly US$44 trillion, driving at least half of the global economy, according to the World Economic Forum.
Presenters at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) acknowledged investment in nature as our most effective tool to address the climate crisis. Yet, there is an estimated US$700 billion gap in nature conservation funding—a gap nowhere near met by current governmental and philanthropic conservation funding, which totals well under US$100 billion a year.
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