Climate change is leaving African elephants desperate for water

The number of African elephants has fallen from about 26 million in the 19th century to 415,000 today. While this is largely due to European colonization, poaching, and habitat loss, these majestic animals now face another serious challenge.

Climate change is causing droughts in much of Africa to be longer and more severe. This damages the elephants’ habitats and denies them the water they need. Due to their unique physiology, African elephants need hundreds of liters of water each day to survive.

The African savannah elephant is listed as endangered. If the situation does not change, Africa, indeed the world, may lose one of its most emblematic animal species.

a tragic situation

Elephants are not only important for their ecological, cultural and economic value. They are also a keystone species, that is, they help hold ecosystems together. This means that its decline has far-reaching consequences.

Many African ecosystems revolve around the life of elephants. Elephants’ feeding habits, such as pushing trees and stripping bark, can turn woody vegetation into grasslands. This leaves room for smaller species to move. Their burrowing for water in dry river beds creates water holes that other animals can use. And as they migrate, elephants help spread seeds in their dung.

Due to climate change, prolonged and intense droughts in southern and eastern Africa are increasing. Some have lasted more than 20 years.

The conditions have left many elephants desperate for water. Research dating back to 2003 shows that elephants in Zimbabwe were dying during the drought. And in 2016, when a dry El Niño weather pattern hit southern Africa, there were reports of more elephant deaths, prompting a local conservation group to drill wells to provide relief.

Drought can also reduce food availability, causing elephants to starve. It can also mean that young elephants die or do not develop properly, because their parched mothers produce less milk.

A unique physiology

So why do elephants fight drought and heat?

When elephants experience high internal temperatures, they can disrupt the function of cells, tissues, and organs such as the liver, causing them to become sick and die.

Humans and other animals also suffer from heat stress. But elephants are particularly vulnerable because they can’t sweat.

The graph below shows how heat accumulates and dissipates in elephants.

Heat is accumulated through the natural metabolism and physical activity of elephants, as well as being absorbed from the environment.

But it does not always dissipate effectively. Elephants’ thick skin slows heat loss, and their lack of sweat glands exacerbates it.

Furthermore, elephants are the largest land mammals, weighing up to eight tons. They also have a large body volume, which generates heat, but a relatively small surface area (their skin) from which they lose this heat.

Water is essential for elephants to cope with the heat. They swim and spray their skin with mud and water; subsequent evaporation mimics sweating and cools them down.

And elephants cool themselves internally by drinking several hundred liters of water a day.

let the elephants roam free

Creating artificial water sources is a common management intervention when elephants need water. This includes the use of pipes, boreholes, and pumps.

But this measure can be problematic. Sometimes the water comes from the supplies needed by the local population. And large numbers of elephants congregating around water can permanently damage the local environment and reduce food availability for other animals.

Historically, elephants migrated to the water during drought. But the introduction of fenced areas into the landscape has interrupted this movement.

Fences were built to delimit colonial ownership of land, separate people from large animals, and deter poachers.

But as climate change worsens in Africa, elephants and other wildlife must be able to move freely between connected habitats.

Wildlife brokers may provide an answer. These are vegetation-protected channels that allow animals to move between fragmented patches of habitat. Wildlife corridors work well for megafauna in India and the United States and would likely increase the mobility of much of Africa’s wildlife.

The introduction of more wildlife corridors, especially in southern and eastern Africa, would require the removal of fences. This change would have repercussions.

Nearby communities, which have not coexisted with elephants since colonization, would have to adapt to the change. The removal of fences can also lead to an increase in poaching. And letting elephants roam the landscape can make it less accessible to tourists, potentially reducing tourism revenue.

But communities have coexisted with elephants in the past. And community projects have been shown to reduce human-wildlife conflict. In some cases, they have also led to lower rates of poaching and a better quality of life for communities.

Community-managed projects, such as in northern Kgalagadi in Botswana, show how local expertise, drawn from millennia of experience and knowledge, can guide wildlife management. Research has shown successful results, both socially and ecologically, in places where elephants share landscapes with people.

Protecting a keystone species

Ensuring that African elephants survive drought will increasingly require new conservation strategies, including community management. Without this, elephant populations, already declining, will continue to decline.

This would be bad news for the health and stability of Africa’s natural ecosystems and a serious blow to the African population.