Can science predict Africa's next human-elephant conflict?

New research suggests conservationists can identify future conflict hotspots decades before they emerge. For Kenya, where expanding farms, settlements and infrastructure increasingly intersect with elephant ranges, the findings could reshape how governments approach one of conservation's most persistent challenges.

By 2085, the areas across parts of Southern Africa where people and elephants are most likely to come into conflict could increase by as much as 100 per cent.

The projection is not based on speculation. It emerges from more than 16 years of verified records of elephant crop-raiding, satellite observations of changing landscapes, climate projections, demographic trends and advanced machine-learning models that together offer an unprecedented glimpse into the future of one of Africa's most enduring conservation challenges.

Published in PNAS Nexus, the study is among the first to forecast where human-elephant conflict is likely to intensify decades before it unfolds. Rather than reacting after crops have been destroyed, livelihoods disrupted or lives lost, the researchers argue that governments and conservation agencies may now have an opportunity to anticipate where future hotspots will emerge and intervene before conflict escalates.

Although the research focused on a vast transboundary landscape spanning northern Namibia, northern Botswana and parts of Angola and Zambia, its implications extend far beyond Southern Africa. Across Kenya, where elephants increasingly share space with expanding human settlements, commercial agriculture and major infrastructure projects, the study raises an important question: can conservation shift from responding to conflict to preventing it?

For decades, human-elephant conflict has remained one of Africa's most complex conservation dilemmas. As elephant populations recover in some regions while human populations continue to grow, competition for land and natural resources has intensified. Farms now occupy areas that once formed seasonal migration routes, roads dissect traditional elephant corridors, while prolonged droughts force both wildlife and communities to depend on increasingly scarce water sources.

Those pressures are already familiar in Kenya. Communities bordering Tsavo, Amboseli, Laikipia, the Mara ecosystem and parts of Taita-Taveta continue to balance the economic benefits of wildlife conservation against the risks of crop destruction, damaged property and, at times, injuries and fatalities. Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has invested in electric fencing, wildlife corridors, community wildlife scouts and compensation programmes, yet conflict remains a persistent challenge wherever people and elephants increasingly compete for space.

According to Dr Lucy E. King, Coexistence Director at Save the Elephants and The Elephant Crisis Fund, science is increasingly enabling conservationists to understand elephant behaviour before conflict occurs.

"By using science to understand elephants better, we can give them a voice and use their natural behaviours to find ways to reduce current cases of human-elephant conflict," she says.

King explains that more than three decades of GPS tracking has transformed understanding of elephant movements across landscapes.

"At Save the Elephants, more than 30 years of GPS tracking data has given us unprecedented insight into how elephants move across landscapes," she says. "By understanding where they travel, feed, mate and how they find water, we can identify critical wildlife corridors and inform land-use planning that keeps these routes open, helping reduce further habitat fragmentation and potential incidents of human-elephant conflict."

That philosophy mirrors the central premise of the new study: that understanding how elephants move today can help predict where conflict is likely to emerge tomorrow.

Led by an international team of scientists from institutions including the University of California, Conservation International, the University of Namibia and Namibia's Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, the researchers analysed more than 16 years of verified elephant crop-raiding incidents recorded between 2004 and 2020 across Namibia's communal conservancies. The incidents were independently verified through Namibia's community-based natural resource management system before being analysed alongside environmental, demographic and climate datasets.

Rather than relying on a single analytical approach, the researchers combined two complementary techniques seldom used together in wildlife conflict studies.

The first employed causal statistical modelling to identify the factors that genuinely drive conflict rather than merely occurring alongside it. The second used machine-learning point process models capable of identifying where conflict is most likely to occur across landscapes. Together, the approaches allowed researchers not only to explain why conflict occurs but also to forecast where it is likely to intensify under different future development and climate scenarios extending to 2085.

The study examined how projected population growth, agricultural expansion, climate change and future land-use patterns could reshape interactions between people and elephants under internationally recognised Shared Socioeconomic Pathway and Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios used by climate researchers worldwide.

The findings point towards a future in which human decisions, rather than climate alone, will largely determine whether coexistence succeeds.

One of the study's most striking conclusions is that expanding human populations and cropland pose a greater long-term threat to peaceful coexistence than climate change acting in isolation.

That challenges a common assumption that rising temperatures and prolonged drought alone will define the future of wildlife conflict. Instead, the researchers found that while increasing aridity influences elephant movement by reducing water and forage availability inside protected areas, it is the rapid expansion of farms, settlements and other human land uses into elephant ranges that most consistently increases the likelihood of conflict.

In other words, the greatest driver of future human-elephant conflict may not simply be a changing climate. It may be where people choose to live, farm and build.

That distinction matters because, unlike global climate trends, land-use planning remains largely within the control of governments, conservation authorities and local communities.

The findings suggest that better planning today could significantly reduce conflict decades from now.

For Prof Charles Musyoki, former KWS Director Wildlife and Community Service, a wildlife scientist and conservation expert, predictive science is already helping conservation managers understand when and where conflict is most likely to occur.

Research on human-elephant conflict, he says, has identified several reliable predictors of elephant crop-raiding, including the season, proximity to natural elephant habitats and protected areas, the size of farms, crop types, crop maturity, elephant migration routes and even full moon periods.

"These predictors offer an opportunity for proactive interventions to prevent the incidence of elephant raids on farms," Musyoki says.

The new Southern African study expands that concept significantly by combining those known predictors with long-term climate, demographic and land-use projections, offering conservation planners the possibility of anticipating conflict years, even decades, before it materialises.

One of the strengths of the research lies not simply in predicting that conflict will increase, but in identifying why.

For years, conservationists have recognised that climate change, expanding agriculture and population growth all contribute to human-elephant conflict. What has remained less clear is which factors matter most and how they interact over time.

By combining causal statistical analysis with machine learning, the researchers were able to separate coincidence from causation, producing a clearer picture of the forces reshaping elephant landscapes.

The analysis found that rising human populations consistently increased the likelihood of crop-raiding incidents across the study area. Expansion of cropland and built-up areas further intensified the risk, particularly during the wet season when crops are most vulnerable to elephants searching for food.

Climate change also emerged as an important factor, though in a more nuanced way than often portrayed.

Rather than directly causing conflict, prolonged drought and increasing aridity reduce water and forage availability within elephant strongholds, encouraging animals to venture beyond protected areas into nearby agricultural landscapes. The research found that drier conditions inside core elephant habitats were associated with higher levels of crop-raiding in neighbouring communities, illustrating how ecological stress can spill over into human settlements.

Yet even under the most severe climate scenarios, land-use change remained the dominant driver.

The researchers concluded that aggressive expansion of settlements and agriculture created significantly larger increases in conflict than climate change acting on its own, reinforcing the idea that decisions about where people live and farm will play a defining role in shaping coexistence over the coming decades.

While Kenya's elephant population is considerably smaller than the approximately 290,000 savanna elephants found across Southern Africa, many of the pressures identified in the study are already evident. Human populations continue to expand around protected areas, agricultural land increasingly borders wildlife habitats, and new roads, railways and other infrastructure have transformed parts of the country's conservation landscape.

These developments have created new interfaces where people and elephants encounter one another more frequently.

The study also sheds light on another often-overlooked aspect of conservation planning: infrastructure.

Roads and wildlife fences are commonly introduced to separate people from wildlife or improve connectivity for communities. However, the researchers found that these structures can also constrain elephant movement, effectively funnelling animals into narrower corridors where encounters with people become more likely.

Random-effects modelling indicated that areas closer to wildlife fences and farther from roads experienced elevated conflict risk, while machine-learning analyses similarly identified roads, fences, tree cover and proximity to rivers among the strongest predictors of future conflict.

The findings do not suggest that roads or fences are inherently harmful. Instead, they highlight the importance of thoughtful planning.

That principle is already shaping conservation work in Kenya.

King says decades of elephant monitoring have shown how scientific data can directly influence land-use decisions before conflict intensifies.

In northern Kenya, data from more than 200 GPS-collared elephants helped identify critical wildlife corridors, including the Oldonyiro Corridor, which has since been incorporated into Isiolo County's Oldonyiro Local Physical and Land Use Development Plan (2024–2034).

Importantly, she says, the tracking data also gave local communities confidence that the corridors being protected were genuinely essential for elephant movement rather than simply being conservation proposals.

Tracking technology is also helping conservationists respond to conflict in real time.

King points to "Goshi", a crop-raiding bull elephant fitted with a GPS collar in Tsavo after repeatedly targeting farms. By monitoring his movements, rapid response teams can intervene when he begins moving towards farmland, reducing the likelihood of crop losses before they occur.

The Southern African study projects how conflict could evolve under different future development pathways.

Using internationally recognised climate-development scenarios, researchers compared futures characterised by stronger sustainability policies with those marked by rapid population growth, regional competition and extensive land conversion.

Across every scenario, conflict increased.

However, the scale varied dramatically.

The most optimistic pathway, based on sustainable development and lower emissions, produced the smallest increase in conflict. By contrast, a future characterised by rapid human expansion and extensive land conversion generated the largest rise in both the frequency and geographic extent of human-elephant conflict.

Most strikingly, areas classified as high-risk conflict hotspots could expand by between one-third and double their current extent by 2085.

Many of those future hotspots overlap with areas already experiencing conflict today, including northern Namibia's Zambezi Region, landscapes bordering Etosha National Park and parts of northern Botswana surrounding the Okavango Delta and Moremi Wildlife Reserve.

Rather than appearing randomly across the landscape, tomorrow's conflict is expected to emerge from places already under pressure.

For conservationists, that presents an opportunity.

If future hotspots can be identified decades in advance, governments and conservation organisations can prioritise investment where it is needed most. Wildlife corridors can be secured before they disappear beneath expanding settlements, while land-use plans can discourage cultivation in the most vulnerable areas.

Yet translating scientific predictions into practical action is rarely straightforward.

Musyoki says the greatest obstacle is often scale.

"The scale of the problem," he says. "It is mostly large expanses of land in remote localities that are affected, making it resource intensive to intervene even when the predictors of human-elephant conflict are accurate."

Resource limitations, he notes, often determine how quickly conservation agencies can respond before elephants reach farms.

King agrees that science alone is not enough.

"One of the biggest challenges is turning scientific findings into coexistence or conservation solutions that are practical and affordable," she says. "For science-led solutions to be embraced by local communities, they have to be within reach, both financially and in the right social context."

Her own work illustrates how research can evolve into practical conservation.

After demonstrating scientifically that elephants naturally avoid bees, King and her colleagues developed beehive fences that discourage elephants from entering farms while creating additional income for communities through honey production.

Today, the approach has expanded to 24 countries across Africa and Asia, with more than 14,000 beehives installed at over 100 sites. Save the Elephants has supported implementation through training, technical guidance and field assistance in countries including Kenya, Botswana, Mozambique and Tanzania.

The lesson, she says, is that coexistence solutions are most effective when communities help design and implement them.

That philosophy underpins Save the Elephants' Human-Elephant Coexistence Toolbox, a practical guide containing more than 80 proven deterrent methods and management approaches that communities can adapt to local conditions.

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution to human-elephant conflict because every landscape is different," King says.

Musyoki believes Kenya's own experience offers valuable lessons for other African countries.

He points to the growth of community conservancies, increasing public participation in wildlife conservation, benefit-sharing initiatives, electric fencing, protection of elephant corridors, translocation programmes, conservation education and the adoption of modern technologies by wildlife response teams.

Collectively, he says, these measures demonstrate that reducing conflict requires both scientific evidence and sustained collaboration with communities.

The broader message of the study extends beyond elephants.

Across Africa, conservationists are grappling with increasing interactions involving lions, leopards, buffaloes, crocodiles, hippos and other wildlife whose ranges increasingly overlap with expanding human settlements.

Although each species presents different ecological challenges, the underlying principle remains the same: understanding where conflict is likely to emerge may prove just as valuable as understanding why it occurs.

The researchers acknowledge that their projections carry uncertainties. Long-term forecasts cannot fully anticipate future infrastructure development, changes in elephant distribution or incomplete reporting of conflict incidents.

Yet across multiple modelling approaches and future development scenarios, one conclusion remained remarkably consistent: expanding human footprints are likely to become the dominant force shaping the future of human-elephant conflict.

For Kenya, where conservation remains closely tied to tourism, rural livelihoods and national identity, the findings offer more than insight into another region's future.

They invite reflection on the country's own development trajectory.

Can roads, railways and settlements be designed while maintaining ecological connectivity? Can county governments integrate wildlife movement into spatial planning before development closes off migration routes? Can conservation become increasingly proactive rather than reactive?

The answers will shape not only the future of elephants but also the resilience of communities living alongside them.

King believes that protecting wildlife corridors through informed land-use planning remains one of the most important investments Africa can make to reduce future conflict.

Ultimately, she says, the future of the continent's elephants will depend on whether they continue to be valued by the people who share the landscape with them.