World Elephant Day: Protecting Elephants, Protecting the Landscape We Share

Communication
7 hours ago
5 min read

This World Elephant Day, Upemba National Park is looking beyond the boundaries of the protected area – to understand where elephants move, why they move, and how people and elephants can share the same landscape more safely.

Few animals embody the scale and complexity of Africa's wild landscapes quite like the elephant. Yet across the continent, the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) faces growing pressure from habitat loss, fragmentation, human activity and poaching. In the Katanga region, that story is particularly plain. Historical estimates suggest that more than 9,500 elephants lived in the region in 1951, while recent estimates indicate that fewer than 150 may remain along the Malemba-Nkulu–Manono axis. For Upemba National Park, protecting these remaining elephants therefore requires more than securing a protected area; it requires understanding the wider landscape on which they depend and the increasingly complex relationship between wildlife and the communities living alongside it.

Following the elephants beyond the boundaries

In May 2025, Upemba conducted a collaring exercise to better understand elephant movements across the landscape. Nine elephants from different herds were fitted with GPS collars, providing our teams with real-time location data and allowing the park to build a clearer picture of their movements, habitat use and seasonal behaviour.

This technology is particularly valuable because the elephants of the region do not remain only in the park. Instead, they move across a complex mosaic of landscape that includes the northeastern sector and the annex zone of the park, while others are found hundreds of kilometers north from the park’s limits. Understanding their movements in general remains essential to determine, factually, where these animals travel, which areas they rely on, and where their movements may bring them into contact with human communities.

The first year of data has already revealed just how expansive these movements can be. Six of the monitored elephants moving through the Malemba-Nkulu–Manono–Kabalo landscape travelled an average of approximately 4,797 kilometres, with an estimated average home range of more than 8,276 km². By comparison, the three elephants monitored around Mabwe (annex zone) travelled an average of approximately 3,476 kilometres, within a much smaller average home range of about 751 km². The difference illustrates the varied ways in which elephants use the Katanga landscape, while also reinforcing a fundamental conservation lesson: an elephant's habitat does not end where a protected area's boundary does.

The telemetry results also demonstrate the importance of landscapes beyond formal protected areas. Along the Malemba-Nkulu–Manono–Kabalo axis, the monitored elephants undertake extensive north-south movements through areas that function as ecological corridors, while the Mabwe group shows a more restricted west-east movement pattern between Lake Mabwe and the Wajika mountain range. Significantly, the study found that the entire range used by the monitored elephants lies outside a formally protected or conserved area, meaning that these animals are sharing their habitat directly with human populations, particularly farmers. Protecting these functional corridors and understanding how elephants use them is therefore essential not only for the species itself, but also for identifying areas where human-elephant interactions are most likely to occur and where preventive action can be taken.

Conservation and coexistence must go together

This is where elephant conservation becomes inseparable from community wellbeing. In parts of the landscape, elephants and people are competing for the same space, and their movements can bring them into agricultural areas where crops and livelihoods are at risk. In some cases, these encounters have also resulted in the loss of human life, creating fear and frustration among communities and making the conservation of elephants considerably more challenging.

When people experience the costs of living alongside wildlife without sufficient support or protection, elephants can understandably come to be seen less as a shared natural heritage and more as a threat to household security. Addressing this reality is therefore not separate from elephant conservation; it is one of its most important conditions for success.

For that reason, Upemba's approach increasingly combines direct wildlife interventions with community engagement and longer-term planning. Around Ankoro, teams have conducted awareness sessions and consultations focused on understanding human-elephant conflict and identifying ways to promote peaceful coexistence.

The search for practical solutions also means exploring ways for communities to protect their livelihoods without harming elephants. For instance, the reports have highlighted the potential of chilli-based barriers, already used in other landscapes, as one possible approach to reducing elephant incursions into vulnerable agricultural areas. Because elephants are naturally deterred by the smell and irritating properties of chilli, such measures can help protect crops without causing injury to the animals, while supporting communities with chilli seeds, training and potentially an additional source of income. These approaches will not solve every human-elephant conflict, but they reflect an important shift in thinking: coexistence requires practical tools that respond to the realities faced by farmers while maintaining the safety and conservation of elephants.

A shared future for elephants and people

The story emerging from Upemba's telemetry work is therefore not simply a story about elephants; it is a story about the landscapes they inhabit and the people who share those landscapes with them. The elephants monitored through the study move across protected and unprotected areas, following seasonal patterns and using corridors that connect different parts of the wider ecosystem. Their survival depends not only on preventing poaching and protecting individual animals, but also on maintaining the ecological connectivity that allows populations to move through the landscape. At the same time, long-term conservation must recognize the realities of communities whose farms, homes and livelihoods overlap with these movement routes. The future of elephant conservation in Katanga will depend on finding ways to address both realities together.

For Upemba National Park, this means continuing to invest in the science needed to understand elephant movements while strengthening the relationships and mechanisms that can make coexistence possible. GPS collars can show conservation teams where elephants are moving; community engagement can help explain what those movements mean for the people living along their routes; and collaborative planning can help identify where corridors, agricultural areas, buffer zones and conservation priorities intersect.

Protecting elephants therefore becomes a landscape-wide effort involving rangers, researchers, communities, local leaders and conservation partners. The objective is not simply to keep elephants inside protected areas, but to create the conditions in which they can move safely through the landscape while communities are better equipped and supported to live alongside them.

We celebrate the landscapes that sustain them and recognize the communities that share those landscapes. We acknowledge the difficult realities of living alongside one of Africa's largest and most powerful animals, while also recognizing that the survival of the elephant in the Katanga landscape depends on our ability to build a relationship between conservation and community wellbeing.