central-africa.md

General Statistics

Region Area - 5,365,550 km²
Range Area - 783,085 km² (15%)
Protected Range - 30%
Information Quality Index (IQI) - 0.13

Current Issues

Central Africa’s elephants have been substantially affected by ivory poaching over the past ten years (CITES, 2016; Maisels, Strindberg et al., 2013b; UNEP et al., 2013; Wittemyer et al., 2014). Evidence from the systematic carcass reports sent to MIKE shows that significant Central African poaching was already occurring in 2003, long before it became unsustainable in Eastern and Southern Africa (CITES Secretariat, 2016). Because elephant distribution and abundance in Central Africa is driven primarily by poaching and not by habitat availability, elephant strong-holds are the areas with least human impact. They are generally areas with effective anti-poaching protection and are also usually remote from roads, settlements, navigable rivers, or even hunting trails (Blake et al., 2008; Laurance et al., 2006; Maisels, Strindberg et al., 2013b; Yackulic et al., 2011). New development corridors being created throughout the region are likely to have a negative impact on elephant populations (Laurance et al., 2015). Political insecurity and lack of government control over remote areas continues to have a negative impact on elephant conservation, particularly in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Central Africa has 16 MIKE sites. Two sites, Monte Alén National Park in Equatorial Guinea and Kahuzi-Biega National Park in DRC, have not submitted any carcass data since the MIKE programme began in 2002. While reporting rates vary, the remaining 14 sites submitted carcass data between 2007 and 2015, though eight of these sites did not submit any carcass data in 2015. Estimated PIKE levels in 2015 sustained the pattern of being above the 0.5 level in Central Africa (Figure 1, on the following page) (CITES Secretariat, 2016).

The Strategy for the Conservation of Elephants in Central Africa 2005-2015 was adopted by all Central African range states in 2005 (African Elephant Specialist Group, 2005a). The volume of seized ivory and illegal killings have greatly increased over the ten-year period in contrast to the 80% decrease projected (CITES, 2016). As a result, in 2013, the seven Central African range states adopted a Plan of Extreme Urgency to Combat Poaching (PEXULAB) (ECCAS, 2013).

In recent analyses of seizure data in ETIS, prepared for the CITES Standing Committee and Conference of the parties, a number of countries within Central Africa were identified as having a worrying involvement in illegal ivory trade. Cameroon, Congo, DRC and Gabon have been requested to prepare and implement National Ivory Action Plans (CITES Secretariat, 2012; Milliken et al., 2013).

ETIS measures and records the levels and trends of illegal trade in ivory and other elephant specimens. The most recent analysis, produced for the 66th meeting of the CITES Standing Committee, demonstrates a trend in illegal ivory trade activity (Figure B) that parallels the illegal killing of elephants reported by MIKE since 2008, with a possible leveling and even a decline in recent years (CITES Secretariat, 2016; Milliken et al., 2016).

Numbers and Distribution

The estimated number of elephants in areas surveyed in in the last ten years in Central Africa is 24,119 ± 2,865 at the time of the last survey for each area. There may be an additional 87,190 to 103,355 elephants in areas not systematically surveyed. Together, this estimate and guess apply to 546,471 km², which is 70% of the estimated known and possible elephant range. There remains an additional 30% of range for which no elephant population estimates are available.

The number of elephants estimated from systematic surveys in Central Africa increased by about 10,000 between the AESR 2007 and the present. However, this was largely a consequence of new populations being surveyed. In a number of cases, the first survey for an area took place after the publication of the AESR 2007 and a subsequent survey showed a decline – which does not show up in the comparisons between the present report and the AESR 2007. The number of elephants recorded as guesses declined between 14,000 and 26,000. Models for the entire region derived from the surveyed populations indicated that Central African elephants declined by over 60% between 2002 and 2011 (Maisels, Strindberg et al., 2013b) and the decline continued at least to 2014 at a rate of about 9% per year (Maisels, Strindberg et al., 2014b).

The proportion of elephant range for which elephant estimates are available currently stands at 70%, an increase from 52% in the previous report. The overall quality of information, as measured by the IQI, has decreased from 0.22 to 0.13.

Historically, elephants were distributed fairly evenly throughout the forests of the region but they are now concentrated in the small country of Gabon, which contains 12% of the total African tropical moist forest area (Verhegghen et al., 2012), and roughly half of Africa’s forest elephants. By contrast, the DRC contains 60% of the region’s forest and less than 10% of its forest elephants.

A number of Central African countries have experienced dramatic losses in some of their elephant populations in the last ten years. These include the loss of between 16,000 and 20,000 forest elephants, representing 60 to 80% of the population, in Minkébé National Park in Gabon (ANPN, 2013), the loss of approximately 3,000 elephants, representing 50% of the population, in the Ndoki landscape in Congo (Maisels et al., 2012), the loss of several thousand elephants in the Cameroon section of the TRIDOM and the loss of more than 50% from a number of smaller populations in Cameroon and the DRC.

There has been a major decline in elephant numbers in Chad, with the major population in Zakouma National Park declining by an order of magnitude between 2005 and 2011, although it has since stabilized. The savanna populations of the Central African Republic have almost completely disappeared, with the only remaining populations occurring in the forested south-west.

Eighty percent of elephant range in Gabon has not been surveyed in the past five years, and some of it has never been surveyed, but there are plans to rectify this in 2017-2018. The main elephant populations of Cameroon were surveyed between 2014 and 2016. In Congo, the Ndoki Likouala area has not been surveyed since 2010-2011 (surveys are ongoing in 2016) and Odzala National Park has not been surveyed since 2012. In DRC, two important populations, Salonga National Park and adjacent areas and the Okapi Faunal Reserve, have not been completely surveyed since 2004 and 2011, respectively, although about 40% of Salonga NP was resurveyed in late 2015.

Populations recorded as having been lost in the last ten years include those of the Siniaka-Minia FR in Chad and Bushimae in the DRC. However, since populations in the extensive Central African forests are much less clearly defined than in other parts of Africa, loss of numbers and range is more likely to be recorded than the loss of discrete populations.

Substantial changes have been made to the range maps, but these are mostly the result of improved information, rather than real changes in range, except in the case of the Central African Republic, where almost all of the range in the north and east of the country has been lost. There has been a decrease of recorded range from about 975,000 km² to about 780,000 km² with known range decreasing from 82% to 58%.