Restoring an iconic species of the Congo basin
A watershed in the journey towards conserving the critically endangered forest elephant and improving the livelihoods of communities in the Congo basin region.
By Sam Nziengui-Kassa, WWF Conservation programme manager in the Republic of Congo
The Tri National Dja-Odzala-Minkébé landscape (TRIDOM) is a 178,000 km² forest that stretches across three countries in the Congo basin: Cameroon, the Republic of Congo and Gabon. The Congo portion of TRIDOM contains some of the most pristine natural sites remaining in the Congo Basin, the second largest tropical forest in the world after the Amazon.
Today, on the occasion of World Elephant Day, I’d like to reflect on Ntokou Pikounda National Park, home to the magnificent forest elephant, an estimated 1,100 in number. Forest elephants are of high conservation concern due to their ecological importance in their forest habitats. With a diet dominated by fruit, they play a crucial role in dispersing many tree species, particularly the seeds of large trees which have high carbon content.
The park is also a refuge for important populations of western gorillas (~10,000), central chimpanzees (~3,000) as well as forest buffaloes, leopards and giant pangolins, among other species. Bouvier’s red colobus monkey was re-discovered in the park in 2015, 40 years after the last sighting in the 1970s and was filmed for the first time, earlier this year by a WWF team in the field.
Due to its rich biodiversity, Ntokou-Pikounda attracts poachers and cross-border networks of ivory traffickers. The situation is dire for forest elephants: A 2017 report mentions a 66% reduction in their numbers in 8 years over parts of the Congo Basin, threatening the long-term survival of this iconic species. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad I feel whenever I come across an elephant carcass without its long, straight, brownish tusks, a characteristic of this elephant species — a victim of poaching. Forest elephants are highly sought by poachers because their ivory is harder than that of the savannah elephant, and is preferred by carvers, as it can be carved into very fine detail.
Due to their slower reproductive rates relative to their cousins on the savanna, forest elephants are highly vulnerable to persistent poaching. The forest elephant has recently been classified as Critically Endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (having experienced a more than 80% decline in less than 30 years). Conservation efforts need to be stepped up, urgently, in the region to secure key remaining forest elephant populations, whose loss would profoundly impact the larger forest ecosystems and change the Congo Basin forest forever.
In 2017, the Congolese government and WWF signed a partnership agreement for the co-management of the Ntokou Pikounda National Park with a view to protecting and safeguarding its biodiversity and especially forest elephants. And I’m glad to say that after 3 years of hard work carried out by the Congolese government through the involvement of indigenous peoples and local communities, and with support from WWF, there are encouraging signs of a drop in poaching.
The park management has set up two multi-stakeholder platforms in two adjacent small towns, Ntokou and Pikounda with representation from the local indigenous community. A grievance mechanism was established where community members can express concerns, report complaints or provide feedback on the programme. In Ntokou a group was established to implement a biomonitoring programme to monitor the local hippopotamus population, one of the biggest populations in the Republic of Congo. The stakeholders agreed on community involvement and identified priority needs of the villages. As a result, communities actively engage in park management (including building the park’s headquarters) and in a first step, five solar powered drinking water wells were placed in and around Pikounda village.
When we began our collaborative work with the government and indigenous peoples and local communities, there was an active presence of elephant poachers all over the park and we found many carcasses of slain elephants with their tusks removed. Last year, we found only one slain forest elephant, which is still one too many, but so much less than when we began that we are now confident that we are having a positive impact. This is partly thanks to the increased presence of the patrol and biomonitoring teams, but also because we have reached important agreements with the local fishermen for regulated access to the park for their traditional fishing. Poachers who used to hide under the guise of fishermen have now lost their cover.
Human-elephant conflict, a growing concern
However, human-elephant conflict is increasingly becoming a major problem for communities outside the park. If unchecked, it could lead to increased incidences of retaliatory killing of elephants that occasionally stray into farmers’ fields causing damage to property and crops, adversely affecting livelihoods.
Across the Congo basin region, we work on reducing those conflicts as much as we can. A new and innovative insurance scheme that allows farmers to be compensated when their fields get destroyed by elephants is one way. Farmers pay the equivalent of 8 Euro into the fund and can receive up to 400 Euro in compensation for damage. We also hope to extend this promising scheme to Ntokou Pikounda in the near future.
This will be part of an integrated strategy that we are going to put in place to better manage human elephant conflicts around Ntokou Pikounda. It is called “Human Wildlife Coexistence through a SAFESystem”, and is an integrated approach that was developed and successfully applied by WWF’s Tigers Alive Initiative in Asia. The SAFE approach is a risk management approach, based on the six elements of Human Wildlife Conflict Management (HWC):
(1) Understanding the conflict,
(2) Mitigating or reducing the impacts of HWC after it occurs,
(3) Responding to or addressing an ongoing HWC incident,
(4) Preventing HWC before it occurs,
(5) Advocating for enabling policy for HWC management, and
(6) Monitoring — Measuring the performance and effectiveness of HWC management interventions.
By assessing HWC in a landscape through a structured stakeholder consultation process, the approach allows managers, decision makers, and practitioners to develop HWC strategies that gradually remove immediate risks and, over time, make the area safe for people, their assets, wildlife, and its habitat.
With this approach, we hope to assist the communities around Ntokou-Pikounda National Park and elsewhere in the Congo Basin to achieve improved levels of coexistence with wildlife and ensure the safety of the local communities living with forest elephants without threatening habitats and elephant populations in the long term. These programs are being developed while WWF is reaching out to donors for funding.
A recent report by WWF and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that human-wildlife conflict is the main threat to the long-term survival of some of the world’s most emblematic species. The report, A future for all — the need for human-wildlife coexistence, highlights that globally, conflict-related killing affects more than 75% of the world’s wild cat species, as well as many other terrestrial and marine carnivore species such as polar bears and Mediterranean monk seals, and large herbivores such as elephants.
If Human-Wildlife Conflict is not adequately addressed by the international community, WWF believes it will have a considerable negative impact on countries’ ability to meet the majority of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). If the world is to have a chance of meeting the SDGs by the 2030 deadline, human-wildlife conflict must be explicitly included in SDG implementation plans, as well as at the heart of the Convention on Biodiversity’s new framework.
