SOUTH AFRICA’S ELEPHANT MANAGEMENT IS AN EXEMPLARY SUCCESS STORY
By Staff Reporter
Kruger Gate:South African National Parks (SANParks) observed 2024 World Elephant Day at Kruger National Park as an occasion to highlight the countries’ successful consultative and inclusive evidence-based and scientific approach to elephant management over the past years.
South African National Parks (SANParks) is today celebrating World Elephant Day at the Kruger National Park (KNP), one of Africa’s great elephant conservation strongholds. Across the world this occasion has been observed annually since its inauguration in 2012, to highlight the status of countries’ elephant management practices, allowing opportunity to highlight lessons learned through both success stories and areas of challenge.
SANParks is celebrating 2024 World Elephant Day under the theme “Evidence Based Conservation – The Success Story Behind South Africa’s Elephant Management Lessons”. This seeks to encourage continuous engagement around elephant management across South Africa on the basis, of evidence based scientific data which is at the backbone of today’s healthy elephant populations.
The theme is also testament of lessons learned over the past years through application of various management approaches which resulted in the recovery of elephant numbers in various national parks. These have resulted in the present-day approach anchored around habitat management and mitigating negative impact of elephants on nature and people.
In other words, SANParks applies itself on how to maintain, restore or modify natural habitats that support and enhance the health, diversity, and productivity of ecosystems. This approach supports elephant well-being, reduces human-wildlife conflict, and promotes community beneficiation whilst maintaining the resilience of ecosystems.
South Africa has around 44,000 elephants within the country’s boundaries, and the population has been increasing over the last century. This trend contrast that of most other places outside Southern Africa where populations have been impacted by ivory poaching, human-elephant conflict, and habitat change. Most of South Africa’s elephants can be found inside state protected areas whilst SANParks manages about 75% of the country’s elephants in five national parks.
The Kruger National Park has a total of around 30 000. About a further 800 are in Addo Elephant National Park, around 600 at Mapungubwe National Park, just under 400 at Marakele National Park and 1 in Garden Route National Park.
In these ecosystems, elephants play a vital role in seed dispersal, bush thinning, influencing fire patterns, and felling trees which then become resources and habitat for other species. As a large and impactful megaherbivore, they also change ecosystems in ways that may be viewed as undesirable, impacting tall trees and certain sensitive habitats negatively, and those impacts needs to be managed. Re-establishing natural resource gradients has been at the forefront of management responses and this included removal of artificial waterpoints and expanding conservation areas through establishing trans-frontier parks.
With elephants increasingly using human-inhabited landscapes, planning and actions around human-elephant conflict are critical. There are a range of novel mechanism that are being trialled in the region to mitigate this conflict. These include chasing elephants out of communal areas, fencing elephants out from sensitive areas, creating elephant barriers (ditches), closing human-made water holes, setting up deterrents like beehives on fences, exploring crop insurances as well as introduce wildlife bonds.
The conservationist of today is facing very different challenges to those from the early 1900’s. Back then the greatest concern was a depleted elephant population and how to recover it. Today it is about maximising the socio-ecological role of elephants whilst minimising the cost to the well-being of people and nature.
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