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.
No such thing as a ‘surplus’ bull
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. 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:
- Undertake a disproportionate share of mating because they are naturally preferred by successful females;
- Moderate younger bulls’ aggression by suppressing musth; and
- Carry long-distance memory of water, forage and safe routes across increasingly variable landscapes.
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.”
DWNP’s claims vs the data
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.
Second, its reassurance that tusk sizes remained stable between 1996 and 2013 ignores the fact that realised harvests in that period averaged only 0.16% of the population per year — less than half the current national quota rate and well below the effective 0.9% in hunting blocks. Treating that period as evidence that today’s higher quotas are safe is a misinterpretation.
Hunting, poaching and a collapsing ivory market
The sustainability of trophy hunting cannot be assessed in isolation. Botswana’s elephants also face mortality from poaching, “problem animal control” (PAC), drought and tusk damage. Poachers and hunters focus on the same age–sex class: large-tusked bulls.
Even though raw ivory prices have dropped to almost $400/kg or less from a high of $2,100 in 2014, syndicates have incentives to bank on extinction, and elephants are still being killed at alarming rates in northern Botswana. Adding regulated trophy hunting of the same animals, in the same landscapes, at a time of climatic stress, does not possess any economic justification once long-term tourism and ecosystem costs are considered.
Who actually benefits?
DWNP and pro-hunting organisations argue that trophy hunting delivers meaningful benefits to rural communities and conservation. The distributional evidence suggests otherwise.
Credible accounts from within Botswana indicate that elephant hunting has become extraordinarily concentrated. One company, run by the Eaton and Kader families, controls a disproportionate share of prime elephant concessions. The company had access to 27.3% of the elephant quota in 2025, and 25% of the leopard quota. Politically connected hunters are sometimes granted access to animals in concessions where local communities object to hunting.
Since 2019 a minimum of 2,305 elephants have been made available as trophies in Botswana. At a conservative average of $75,000 per hunt, and assuming full uptake, hunting companies have been awarded business worth about $173m for elephants alone.
Over the same period (including 2026 but excluding 2021), the DWNP has made available 1,018 elephants (44% of the total 2,305) to community trusts. If we assume an indicative average payment of $11,274 per community elephant (a mere 150,000 pula, though they are sometimes sold for as low as 70,000 pula), that yields roughly $11.47m (1,018 x $11,274); about 6.23% of the total fees paid by hunters.
It is not clear how much of this reaches the poorest households, if any. There is no transparency from the government on how many elephants have been shot, what revenue has been earned by whom, and how these revenues have been distributed.
Africa Geographic’s forensic review of the Tcheku Community Trust’s (in the NG13 concession) 2022 accounts shows the trust receiving about $100,000 for a quota that included five elephants and two leopards, while the operator, Old Man’s Pan, owned by local hunter Leon Kachelhoffer, booked about $445,000 in trophy fees, leaving the trust with a measly 22% of the total.
Ownership patterns further complicate the “community benefit” narrative. Beyond a handful of local firms, many prime concessions are operated or marketed by foreign outfitters, including long-standing US operator Jeff Rann. Most surprisingly, South African hunter Dawie Groenewald — convicted in the US for illegally importing a protected species in violation of the Lacey Act and facing more than 1,600 rhino-poaching and wildlife-trafficking charges in South Africa — has also controversially been the beneficiary of community hunting quotas in Botswana.
In a system where a single foreign hunter can pay upwards of $100,000 to kill one bull, yet only a fraction of that reaches local communities, the claim that trophy hunting is primarily a community-development tool is unjustified.
Elephants, tourism and planetary boundaries
Botswana’s tourism sector, and by extension Southern Africa’s, depends heavily on elephant survival. Recent (2023) World Tourism & Travel Council estimates suggest that travel and tourism account for about 12% of Botswana’s GDP. Independent academic and policy analyses indicate that most of this is wildlife-based.
If the age structure and behaviour of elephant herds are degraded by concentrated offtake of mature bulls, the quality of the tourism experience declines: fewer large bulls, more skittish herds, accompanied by shorter and more distant sightings.
From the perspective of planetary boundaries — climate, biodiversity, freshwater and land-system change — elephants are not merely an input into a tourism value chain. As ecosystem engineers they help structure savannas and woodlands, influencing carbon sequestration capacity, fire regimes and hydrological flows. Managing them primarily as a source of tusks and trophies, in a world in which we’ve already transgressed multiple biophysical limits, is economically and ecologically myopic.
The choice facing Botswana, and by extension the region, is not “people versus elephants”. It is between:
- A short-term, elite-driven extraction model that depletes elephant societies and erodes the tourism base while delivering limited, uneven community benefits; and
- A co-operative model in which elephants are treated as partners in climate resilience and rural development — protected across corridors, buffered by conservation-compatible, climate-resilient agriculture, and embedded in tourism value chains that genuinely include local communities.
Shockingly, the draft 2026 elephant hunting quota indicates for the first time that there will be no close to the season. As Chase indicates: “Removing the closed hunting season fundamentally changes the rhythm of Botswana’s elephant landscape. By allowing elephants to be hunted year-round, Botswana has erased the one seasonal refuge these animals once had, exposing them to constant pressure in landscapes already strained by poaching, heat, drought and conflict.”
EWB has placed the science directly on the desks of Botswana’s leaders. All indications suggest they will still move ahead with a quota that sanctions the killing of 430 elephants in 2026. Choosing to reverse course in light of the evidence is now a test of leadership — and a defining moment for the future Botswana chooses in a rapidly warming world.
- Dr Harvey, a research associate at Wits University, is MD of research consultancy Harvey Economics. He writes in his personal capacity.