Illegal wildlife trade continues to threaten African elephants
Illegal wildlife trade continues to threaten African elephants
Defence Web
January 13, 2023
Illegal killing for ivory continues to threaten African elephants. To help
guide responses to the ongoing poaching, a study by the University of Cape
Town (UCT) and Oxford University sought to uncover what might drive,
facilitate, or motivate continent-wide poaching.
In the paper, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society recently,
the study found that the illegal killing of elephants is associated with
poor national governance, low law enforcement capacity, low household
wealth and health, and global elephant ivory prices. It further found that
forest elephant populations suffered higher rates of illegal killing than
savannah elephants.
The study, in which Dr Tim Kuiper and Professor Res Altwegg of the Centre
for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation at the UCT
Department of Statistical Sciences participated, found weak evidence that
armed conflicts may increase the illegal killing of elephants, and no
evidence for effects of site accessibility, vegetation density, elephant
population density, precipitation, or site area.
Addressing wider systemic challenges of human development, corruption, and
consumer demand would help reduce poaching, corroborating broader work
highlighting these more ultimate drivers of the global illegal wildlife
trade.
“We developed a model using 19 years of data on 10,286 illegally killed
elephants detected at 64 sites in 30 African countries (2002-2020). These
data were collected, mostly by wildlife rangers, as part of the global
programme for Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE),
administered by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES). Our model linked these data on elephant killings to key
socio-economic data related to the areas around the Parks, individual
countries, and global markets,” says Kuiper.
Kuiper adds that poaching of high-value species like elephants and
rhinoceros is driven primarily by sophisticated criminal syndicates.
“We used criminology theory and evidence from the scientific literature to
generate hypotheses about factors that may drive, facilitate, or motivate
the decisions of these syndicates and the local hunters they recruit. We
then identified datasets representing these factors,” he says.
The illegal wildlife trade is one of the highest value illicit trade
sectors globally, with thousands of wildlife species, worth billions of
dollars, being poached, trafficked and sold annually. This is a major
threat to biodiversity and ecosystems, which are the bedrock of human
well-being as the recent multi-national UN Biodiversity Conference made
clear, the UCT said.
African elephant populations have experienced significant declines (~30%)
since 2006 due to consistently high rates of illegal killing. Apart from
the loss of a culturally significant icon, elephant poaching results in
lost tourism revenues for African countries, threatens the important role
that elephants have as “ecosystem engineers” for healthy ecosystems, and
results in both poachers and rangers losing their lives in a violent
‘biodiversity war’. When elephants lose, we all lose, UCT researchers noted.
Kuiper says: “The strong associations we found between poaching and factors
like corruption and human development do not necessarily imply that these
factors directly cause poaching, correlation does not imply causation.
Deeper research into these associations at particular sites will help to
see what underlying processes are at play, and better understand cause and
effect. Furthermore, we could not test many plausible drivers of poaching
due to a lack of comparable site-level data on things like changes in local
political will, influxes of conservation funding, or socio-economic shocks.”
Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland from the University of Oxford remarked:
“Although we cannot claim causality, we make some suggestions about what
might lie behind the associations which we found, based on understanding
from previous research studies. For example, a key finding was that having
controlled for other factors, higher levels of local human well-being in
the areas around a Park was associated with lower poaching. One explanation
could be that, in areas of economic deprivation, local residents may
participate in illegal killing to meet their basic needs or earn extra
income, in the absence of viable alternatives. Another interpretation might
be that criminal ivory syndicates seeking to recruit local hunters target
these areas because they are able to operate more effectively there for a
range of possible reasons.”
Kuiper says although they found that sites with higher armed conflict
intensity tended to have higher rates of poaching, the relationship was
weak and was strongly influenced by data from just 2-3 high conflict sites.
“We thus concluded that the positive conflict-poaching relationship in our
model may not reflect a generalised driver of poaching, suggesting that the
supposed strong links between armed conflict and the ivory trade may be
over-stated,” he said.
The study suggests that tackling poaching requires dealing with the wider
systemic challenges of human development, corruption, and consumer demand,
and not just focussing on actions which would be traditionally defined as
‘wildlife conservation’.