By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick Strangefoot, the Knysna Forest’s last wild elephant, continues to walk alone while a privately funded plan to reintroduce companions stalls and is withdrawn. Deep in the moss-slicked silence of the Knysna Forest is a single trail of...
By Tracy Keeling - The 4 Percent The global wildlife trade body's triennial meeting delivered triumphs for some species but illuminated systemic weaknesses that point to a troubling road ahead. At its latest triennial conference, the global wildlife trade...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick A new report shows an increase in estimated forest elephant numbers, but this is a function of better surveying, and the species remains critically endangered. A new 2024 status report dedicated to the African forest elephant...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick CITES CoP20 in Samarkand exposed a stark truth: the conservation model southern Africa has spent decades promoting is no longer credible. Southern Africa’s conservation story – the one the region has been selling internationally for...
By Adam Cruise - AllAfrica When Dr Mike Chase banks the small survey plane over northern Botswana’s mopane woodlands, he can see the country’s wildlife story written in the dust below. Carcasses — some months old, others more recent — lie scattered along ancient...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick This crisis is not an excess of elephants, but an excess of human walls, human weapons and human denial. If you only read the headlines, you’d think southern Africa is groaning under a booming elephant problem with no silver bullet in...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick In a brief note, President Cyril Ramaphosa has accepted DA leader John Steenhuisen’s request to remove the key wildlife portfolio from Dion George. A short statement from the office of the Presidency has ended speculation and rising...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Eskom’s proposed transmission line in Limpopo illustrates the cruel paradox of South Africa’s energy dilemma: a coal-dependent grid already fuelling climate change is now being expanded in ways that further destroy biodiversity. South...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick The move to oust the environment minister exposes a deeper hijacking – of the National Elephant Heritage Strategy, of policy integrity and of conservation itself. When South Africa’s National Elephant Heritage Strategy (NEHS)...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick Behind claims of escalating human-elephant conflict lies a tangle of weak data, mismanagement and a R460-million fund that seems to need a crisis more than it proves one. Are elephants becoming increasingly dangerous to humans? Deputy...