Durban — According to a study by UCT and Oxford University illegal killing of elephants is associated with poor national governance, low law enforcement capacity and low household wealth and health.
The study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society recently found that forest elephant populations suffered higher rates of illegal killing than Savannah elephants.
Dr Tim Kuiper for the Centre of Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation at the UCT Department of Statistical Sciences, said 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.
Kuiper explained that they developed a model using 19 years of data on 10,286 illegally killed elephants detected at 64 sites in 30 African countries (2002-2020). The data was 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,” said Dr Kuiper.
He said 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 multinational UN Biodiversity Conference made clear,” he said.
Dr Kuiper added and 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’.
Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland from the University of Oxford said although causality cannot be claimed, they made some suggestions about what might lie behind the associations which they 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,” said Milner-Gulland.
Daily News