As the dust settles on the latest UN climate summit in Belém, one thing is now unavoidable: the world is not on track to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Analyses of the COP30 outcome and the UN’s latest synthesis of national climate pledges all point in the same direction — current efforts fall well short of the Paris goal. In this hotter, harsher world, Africa’s elephants are not a luxury.
They are key allies in keeping forests breathing and savannas functioning — the living lungs of the planet. This is the context in which the new scientific report by Elephants Without Borders (EWB) on Botswana’s elephant hunting programme should be read. It is not simply about quotas; it is about whether one of the region’s most important climate and tourism assets is being managed on the basis of evidence or wishful, extractivist thinking.
Typically, political rationale for elephant trophy hunting draws on a delusion that one can remove “surplus” males that have “already passed on their genes”, bank the fees, and leave the population essentially unchanged. The EWB report directly contradicts this. Using an age-structured population model parameterised with long-term demographic data, the authors show that mature bulls are central to elephant survival and social stability, and cannot be treated as expendable.
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The Amboseli elephant project in Kenya, research by Connie Allen, and EWB’s own elephant ecology programme in northern Botswana, all demonstrate that older males: Removing these animals — especially at current quota levels — reduces the number of bulls over 30, 40 and 50 years old. Herd size may appear stable in the short term, but the capacity to reproduce, navigate and cope with drought is progressively eroded. As EWB director Mike Chase has put it: “Wildlife must be managed for the survival and integrity of the species; only then can people benefit from it.
When policy prioritises human needs over biological realities, both the species and the communities ultimately lose.” Botswana’s department of wildlife and national parks (DWNP) characterises the draft 2026 elephant quota of 430 bull elephants — about 0.35% of a claimed 120,000-160,000 population — as “irrelevant in numerical terms and negligible in biological terms”, with “no effect on limiting population growth”. But the EWB data is clear that Botswana’s elephant population has hardly increased since 2014 and is highly stable at about 130,000. Beyond the standard population question, the spatial distribution of elephants is all important for the matter at hand.
DWNP’s guideline is that hunting should not exceed 0.5% of the population in hunting blocks. Using the 2022 Kaza (Kavango Zambezi) survey, EWB estimates that northern hunting blocks hold about 40,000 elephants, rising to perhaps 45,000 once central and southern blocks are included. Against that denominator, a quota of 430 elephants corresponds to an effective offtake of about 0.9% in hunting areas — almost double DWNP’s own rule of thumb.
EWB’s age-structured model indicates that offtake at this rate causes mature bulls (30 years or older) in hunted populations to decline sharply over the next 25 years, even before accounting for drought or poaching. Average tusk size converges towards the minimum threshold acceptable to clients. “We used our model to ask what would happen if elephant hunting quotas were set at 0.9%, the effective harvest rate if hunting blocks are considered on their own, for an extended period.
Results show that the overhunting is rapid and severe, with mature bulls (30 years or older) disappearing from the population within 25 years.” This hardly equates to DWNP’s blithe assertion that the impact of its quota will be “biologically negligible”. DWNP continues to cite a population model developed by Craig et al (2011) to claim that quotas “up to 1%” are eminently sustainable. EWB’s technical review raises two problems with this reliance. First, the Craig model is faulty as it uses invented survival rates and omits density dependence, so it cannot reliably predict how real elephant populations respond to differing offtake levels.
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