To protect elephants, let them move

“We have fragmented the world and we need to stitch it back together again,” says Stuart Pimm, a professor at America’s Duke University and part of a team that found conservation efforts have halted the decline of elephants in southern Africa. Their research, published in Science Advances, examined over 700 population surveys from protected areas from Tanzania southward over the past 25 years. The team found that elephant populations across southern Africa had grown 0.16 per cent annually – although some areas suffered severe declines due to poaching – with the most successful cases found in protected territories that were connected to each other rather than “fortress” parks that do not allow the animals to migrate.