At a crossroads: African elephant conservation, climate change and community-based management
Creators: name: Gross, Rachael
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2023

description: The African elephant (Loxodonta africana) susceptibility to climate change is not well documented. Elephants are likely to struggle with drought conditions because they are biophysically susceptible to heat stress. As drought conditions across sub-Saharan Africa intensify elephants are inhibited by poor thermoregulatory mechanisms and confinement in protected areas. Climate-specific research is lacking which limits options for informing management and policy. This thesis seeks to explore how elephants are responding spatially to climate change induced drought, how their responses will impact the landscapes around them and how their relationships with local human communities may shift. Chapter 1 is an Introduction to the thesis. Chapter 2 explores the biophysical susceptibility of elephants to drought. Elephants are susceptible to climate change-induced drought from a cellular to a landscape level and current management strategies can amplify conservation issues. It concludes that elephants need room to move between sources of surface water and climate change needs to be factored into management. Chapter 3 is a systematic review of ecological research published on elephants from 2000 to 2020. It evaluates whether the research is diverse enough to inform managers across the species' range and identifies important gaps and biases. Elephant research is biased towards a few small elephant populations. These biases may lead to management strategies overly dependent on misrepresentative information from a small subset of the meta-population. The biases may be a result of poor accessibility and systemic conservation research barriers. I recommend theoretical research frameworks built around need instead of accessibility, and meaningful community collaboration. Chapter 4 is a continent-wide index model of habitat suitability for elephants using satellite data. The model predicts areas of increased human/elephant conflict because of resource depletion and shows the role of smaller protected areas in the future of elephant migration and habitat refuges. Habitat suitability inside protected areas is mid-range while the 10km buffer zones around have mid-high habitat suitability. Smaller protected areas have higher habitat suitability than larger. The risk of human-elephant conflict is increasing because the buffer zones around protected areas show are of high value for elephants. Investment in wildlife corridors and community-based management including trans-frontier areas and contiguous protected areas will help manage this. Chapter 5 uses GPS collar data for eight elephants to track occupancy time in different habitats under climate extremes Precipitation has the strongest influence on elephant habitat use. Elephants may be using forests as heat refuges and spent more time in human dominated landscapes. I recommend investment in wildlife corridors, community-based management and trans-frontier areas/contiguous protected areas. Chapter 6 summarises my research findings and list my overall conclusions, including the significance and limitations of my research. I include a sub-section on community based natural resource management (CBNRM) as the key management recommendation. It discusses how colonisation changed the relationship between humans and nature in Africa, pitting people against wildlife, a problem perpetuated by current research methods and conservation strategies. CBNRM can be improved by committing and investing by becoming truly community focused. Climate change will continue to intensify drought conditions across elephant habitat. Elephants are already responding to drought conditions and incidentally interacting more with humans. Elephants are spending more time outside protected areas in human-dominated spaces. Research and management work largely within colonial frameworks which are not conducive to adaptive or integrative policy for droughts, climate change and landscape-level environmental changes.