The Impact of Climate Change and Habitat Loss on African Elephants in the Greater Virunga Landscape: A Dynamic Simulation Study

February 4, 2024 / activist360

Artwork for Bill Madden’s music video “Mother”. The artwork was created by Kasia Haldas. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Introduction

African elephants, the majestic giants of the savannah and forests, are facing unprecedented threats from habitat loss, human-wildlife conflicts, and the looming specter of climate change. A recent study by Simon Nampindo and Timothy O. Randhir, published on January 31, 2024, in PLOS Sustainability & Transformation, uses dynamic modeling to unravel how these factors are influencing elephant populations in the Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL), a biodiversity hotspot in Africa.

Greater Virunga Landscape with vegetation map.

Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL) with vegetation map. Developed by Simon Nampindo and Timothy O. Randhir in collaboration with the WCS Uganda program. The GVL straddles Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Understanding the African Elephant Crisis

The African elephant, once roaming freely across vast stretches of the continent, is now confined to fragmented habitats, with populations experiencing alarming declines. The 2016 IUCN African Elephant Status Report highlighted a 30% decline over ten years, with human activities and climate change at the heart of this crisis. Elephants play a pivotal role in their ecosystems, from seed dispersal to landscape modification, making their decline a matter of global environmental concern.

The Study: A Closer Look

Nampindo and Randhir’s study is a testament to innovative conservation science, employing dynamic simulation models to analyze the effects of changing climates, habitat loss, and water resource availability on the age-class structure of elephant populations. Their research, underpinned by data from the GVL — an area spanning Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — provides a comprehensive understanding of how different age classes of elephants respond to environmental stressors. This approach is crucial for developing targeted conservation strategies.

Conceptual model for population dynamics of elephants in GVL, linking climate, habitat changes, and resource variability to population shifts over 50 years.

Key Findings

The study reveals several critical insights:

Climate Change Impacts: Older elephants are more vulnerable to climate change, affecting their survivability and migration patterns. This vulnerability is attributed to direct impacts, such as disease and physiological stress, and indirect ones, like habitat alteration and drought-induced deaths such as fire and risk of predation.
Habitat and Water Resources: An improvement in habitat quality and water availability positively affects elephant populations, emphasizing the need for conservation efforts that enhance these critical resources.
Future Projections: Without mitigating environmental and anthropogenic stressors, the GVL could see a demographic shift towards younger elephants, potentially impacting the long-term viability of these populations.

Conservation Implications

The research underscores the necessity for a transboundary management approach, incorporating climate change mitigation, cooperation among conservation agencies, and partnerships with relevant stakeholders. It also highlights the importance of understanding age-specific responses of elephants to environmental changes, facilitating the development of comprehensive conservation strategies that address water availability and habitat quality.

To ensure the survival of African elephants in the face of climate change and habitat loss, the study recommends:

Enhanced Transboundary Cooperation: Strengthening collaboration across borders to ensure cohesive conservation efforts.
Habitat Restoration and Protection: Implementing measures to improve habitat quality and connectivity, including reforestation and the establishment of wildlife corridors.
Community Engagement: Involving local communities in conservation efforts, providing them with sustainable livelihood options to reduce human-wildlife conflicts.

The study by Nampindo and Randhir offers a critical roadmap for the conservation of African elephants in the Greater Virunga Landscape. By focusing on the dynamic interplay between climate change, habitat loss, and elephant population dynamics, their work provides valuable insights for crafting resilient conservation strategies. As we face the challenges of a changing planet, such research is indispensable for guiding our efforts to preserve the natural world and its magnificent inhabitants.

Final Thoughts

This comprehensive study not only advances our understanding of the intricate relationships between elephants and their environment but also serves as a clarion call for urgent, collaborative conservation action. The fate of Africa’s elephants hangs in the balance, and it is incumbent upon us all to heed this call and act decisively to secure their future.

E.O. Wilson’s lifelong passion for ants and conserving the World’s biodiversity

January 2, 2022 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*E.O. Wilson in February 2003. Source: Jim Harrison, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons*

Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

By Doug Tallamy, The Conversation (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I met Edward O. Wilson in 1982, he had already made at least five such contributions to science.

Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies.

Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O.—as he was fondly known—was an academic god for many young scientists like me. This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study.

Big insights from small subjects

In 1982 I cautiously sat down next to the great man during a break at a small conference on social insects. He turned, extended his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” Then we talked until it was time to get back to business.

Three hours later I approached him again, this time without trepidation because surely now we were the best of friends. He turned, extended his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Wilson forgetting me, but remaining kind and interested anyway, showed that beneath his many layers of brilliance was a real person and a compassionate one. I was fresh out of graduate school, and doubt that another person at that conference knew less than I — something I’m sure Wilson discovered as soon as I opened my mouth. Yet he didn’t hesitate to extend himself to me, not once but twice.

Thirty-two years later, in 2014, we met again. I had been invited to speak in a ceremony honoring his receipt of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science. The award honored Wilson’s lifetime achievements in science, but particularly his many efforts to save life on Earth.

My work studying native plants and insects, and how crucial they are to food webs, was inspired by Wilson’s eloquent descriptions of biodiversity and how the myriad interactions among species create the conditions that enable the very existence of such species.

I spent the first decades of my career studying the evolution of insect parental care, and Wilson’s early writings provided a number of testable hypotheses that guided that research. But his 1992 book, “The Diversity of Life,” resonated deeply with me and became the basis for an eventual turn in my career path.

Though I am an entomologist, I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes.

Throughout his career Wilson flatly rejected the notion held by many scholars that natural history—the study of the natural world through observation rather than experimentation—was unimportant. He proudly labeled himself a naturalist, and communicated the urgent need to study and preserve the natural world. Decades before it was in vogue, he recognized that our refusal to acknowledge the Earth’s limits, coupled with the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth, had set humans well on their way to ecological oblivion.

Wilson understood that humans’ reckless treatment of the ecosystems that support us was not only a recipe for our own demise. It was forcing the biodiversity he so cherished into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one caused by an animal: us.

*Upper Guinean Forest change from 1975 to 2013. Source: USGS.*

E.O. Wilson long advocated conserving the world’s biodiversity hot spots—zones with high numbers of native species where habitats are most endangered. This image shows deforestation from 1975 to 2013 in one such area, West Africa’s Upper Guinean Forest. USGS

A broad vision for conservation

And so, to his lifelong fascination with ants, E. O. Wilson added a second passion: guiding humanity toward a more sustainable existence. To do that, he knew he had to reach beyond the towers of academia and write for the public, and that one book would not suffice. Learning requires repeated exposure, and that is what Wilson delivered in “The Diversity of Life,” “Biophilia,” “The Future of Life,” “The Creation” and his final plea in 2016, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”

As Wilson aged, desperation and urgency replaced political correctness in his writings. He boldly exposed ecological destruction caused by fundamentalist religions and unrestricted population growth, and challenged the central dogma of conservation biology, demonstrating that conservation could not succeed if restricted to tiny, isolated habitat patches.

“Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.”
—Edward O. Wilson

In “Half Earth,” he distilled a lifetime of ecological knowledge into one simple tenet: Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

But is this possible? Nearly half of the planet is used for some form of agriculture, and 7.9 billion people and their vast network of infrastructure occupy the other half.

As I see it, the only way to realize E.O.’s lifelong wish is learn to coexist with nature, in the same place, at the same time. It is essential to bury forever the notion that humans are here and nature is someplace else. Providing a blueprint for this radical cultural transformation has been my goal for the last 20 years, and I am honored that it melds with E.O. Wilson’s dream.

There is no time to waste in this effort. Wilson himself once said, “Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.” Whether humans have the wisdom to meet that deadline remains to be seen.

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 103 research publications and has taught insect related courses for 40 years.

Products tied to legal and illegal deforestation may be banned in the European Union

November 21, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By Maxwell Radwin, Mongabay (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Proposed legislation in the European Union would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to legal or illegal deforestation.
The law would focus on the industries with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture.
Conservation groups have expressed satisfaction with the first-of-its kind legislation but are concerned about the lack of protections for Indigenous peoples, as well as carbon-rich ecosystems like savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

The European Union is considering an ambitious new proposal that would regulate imports of products linked to global forest loss.

The law would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to deforestation, whether legal or illegal. If passed, it would force producers to raise their environmental standards or risk losing out on a market of 27 countries and 450 million people.

“Europe is finally taking steps against the deforestation that it drives, and it is doing it not by placing the burden on consumers, but on the big companies that produce these products,” Nico Muzi, Europe director of environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth, told Mongabay. “If we want change, we need to regulate the industries that cause deforestation.”

The proposal, introduced by the European Commission earlier this week, gives special focus to products with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture. Should the proposal pass, importers will have to meet stricter traceability measures, such as sharing geographic coordinates of where their products originated.

It also establishes a benchmarking system to determine which countries are the most at risk of deforestation, and pledges 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to help them develop more sustainable forest management programs.

The EU predicts the proposal will cut at least 31.9 million metric tons of annual carbon emissions and save around 3.2 billion euros ($3.6 billion).

“We must protect biodiversity and fight climate change not only in the EU, but globally, and our consumption should not contribute to global deforestation, which is a major cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries.

Between 1990 and 2020, an estimated 420 million trees were lost to deforestation worldwide, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Agriculture is responsible for nearly 90% of that, with cattle ranching being the biggest contributor.

Globally, Europe is the second-largest importer of products associated with deforestation, according to a 2021 WWF report. In recent years, trade to the region has led to around 16% of global forest loss.

*A herd of cattle on a ranch in Colombia. Image by Rhett Butler, Mongabay.com*

The deforestation proposal is part of a package of recently announced environmental initiatives that include more rigorous regulations for waste and waste trafficking, as well as improved soil protections to increase carbon storage in agricultural areas, fight desertification and restore degraded land, the European Commission said in a statement.

“If we expect more ambitious climate and environmental policies from partners, we should stop exporting pollution and supporting deforestation ourselves,” Sinkevičius said, adding, “With these proposals, we are taking our responsibility and walking the talk by lowering our global impact on pollution and biodiversity loss.”

Other countries, coming out of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, have announced similar plans to clean up supply chains. Last week, the U.K. passed a law banning products linked to illegal deforestation. In October, U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill that holds importers accountable for forest loss.

However, unlike the European proposal, neither of those measures targets legal drivers of deforestation.

Loopholes and missed opportunities

While the EU’s proposal takes ambitious steps to protect forests, it falls short when it comes to other types of carbon-rich ecosystems, some environmental groups pointed out. For example, the proposal’s current language would exclude protection of many savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

In addition to storing massive amounts of carbon, these ecosystems prevent soil erosion and flooding, and help provide clean drinking water.

“There’s simply no need to destroy native ecosystems to make room for commercial crops,” Mighty Earth’s Muzi said. “There are more than 1 billion acres [400 million hectares] of previously degraded land where all future agricultural needs can easily be met without threatening the world’s last ecosystems.”

Mongabay has reported extensively on the rapid disappearance of wetlands and peatlands due to palm oil, timber and other agricultural commodities, as well as governments’ continued omission of these landscapes from legislation.

The EU’s proposal also fails to include special protections for Indigenous communities, which often serve as stewards of the environment. Instead, it relies on the local laws of the exporting countries despite the fact they’re often weak or ignored.

Muzi said he expects officials to close this loophole by including international human rights standards in the proposal’s language. And because proposals by the European Commission are often heavily revised, he expects many of the other loopholes to be addressed, too.

“Usually, Europe sets the standard for environmental regulations,” he said. “It is often at the forefront. We expect other regions will follow.”