In July of this year, the five neighbouring countries that contribute lands to the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area began a first cross-border aerial survey of the region’s elephant.
The KAZA conservation area is made up of lands found in Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. It is a vast natural ecosystem and it is home to over half of the globe’s African elephant population.
If you read our previous article exploring and assessing the population stability of Africa’s elephant (Are Africa’s elephant populations increasing or decreasing?), you’ll know that southern Africa has a largely stable elephant population. Poaching, to a large degree, is not so pressing a concern for southern african nations as it is for those in West and Central Africa.
In fact, conservationists in the countries that comprise the KAZA ecosystem often face other issues. Botswana is home to roughly 130,000 African elephant. That makes it the country with the largest elephant population in the world.
Botswana is also a country of extremes. The Kalahari desert dominates some 70 or so percent of the territory that makes it up while the north-west of Botswana is the famously wet, and wild, Okavango Delta.
These topographical eccentricities push the human population, numbered at around 2.3 million individuals, into close contact with the elephant that similarly settle where it is neither too hot nor too wet to roam.
In Botswana, elephant are considered such a danger to human beings that, two years ago, an elephant express line was developed to carry children and healthcare workers across elephant corridors. The fear previously was that children walking to school, or adults heading to work, were in great danger of encountering these occasionally aggressive animals.
Despite that population levels of elephant are largely stable in southern Africa, there are obviously still concerns. Those concerns are couched in peaceful cohabitation arguments and also the future of these elephant as human populations grow around them.
The high density of elephant populations in certain areas and the fact that habitat fragmentation often isolates certain populations is much more of a concern for KAZA’s elephant.
This aerial survey will give conservationists and wildlife services professionals the opportunity to gauge density and spread. The survey is being framed as a fact-finding mission, one that will help Southern Africa’s nations better understand where conservation efforts are working, where they are not and whether more needs to be done to facilitate ease of movement for these creatures.
The idea for this transfrontier survey was launched in November of last year and it was gazetted to cost the combination of nations some 3 Million US dollars.
Elephant are migratory animals and they have been known to traverse vast territories in the search for water, food or as they follow signs that we can only guess at. The population of elephant in KAZA represents the largest contiguous transboundary population.
Understanding where they are placed, where they congregate and where they look to be threatened will be key if we are to understand how this hugely important ecosystem is to be managed. Furthermore, the lessons that are learnt from this survey, on placement and congregation high points may well be important in the establishment of elephant corridors in other countries.
Here in Kenya, for example, where elephant population size looks set to rise as a result of successes in conservation, the next step in securing the future of Kenyan elephant is ensuring that the presently fragmented populations are allowed to link up. Elephant corridors are essential for the health of the species.
Fragmented, smaller populations are more susceptible to localised threats and to disease and, with human populations ballooning across the content, fragmentation and habitat loss increasingly becomes the number one issue for elephant conservation.