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For generations, farmers have found ways to protect crops from wildlife. While fences may deter smaller animals and predators can help control rodents, preventing damage from a six-ton African elephant presents a far greater challenge. New research led by Dr. Evan Patrick, a postdoctoral researcher at emLab, Marine Science Institute, suggests that continued human population growth, agricultural expansion, and climate change are likely to increase encounters between people and elephants in the coming decades. The Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) is a collaboration between the University of California, Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute, Department of Economics, and Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, bringing together expertise in environmental science, economics, and policy. The study projects that, without careful planning, the likelihood of human–elephant conflict across southern Africa could nearly double by the end of this century.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Nexus, the study shows how land-use decisions made today could reduce future conflict while supporting both wildlife conservation and rural livelihoods.
Approximately 290,000 African savanna elephants share landscapes with farming communities across southern Africa. As agriculture expands into elephant habitat, crop raiding has become a growing concern, often causing substantial financial losses and threatening household food security.
"Human-elephant conflict is a thorny issue in Southern Africa," said Dr. Patrick. "Elephants' crop raiding is linked to food insecurity and declining support for conservation initiatives in the region."
To better understand what drives these interactions, the research team analyzed crop-raiding records from Namibia's communal conservancies collected between 2004 and 2020. Using statistical and machine learning models, they identified the factors associated with conflict and projected how future changes in climate and land use could affect risk across the region.
The study found that expanding human populations, increasing agricultural development, and drier conditions within elephant habitat all contribute to greater conflict. As climate change reduces the availability of natural food resources, elephants increasingly move into cultivated fields in search of forage.
Human-elephant conflict is a thorny issue in Southern Africa.
Unlike many African countries where wildlife reserves are fenced, much of Namibia and neighboring countries maintain connected, largely unfenced protected areas that support more than half of the world's remaining African savanna elephants. Where fences do exist, however, they can funnel elephant movement into narrow bottlenecks, increasing crop damage in nearby communities. The researchers suggest that better-designed wildlife corridors could help reduce these pressures.
The researchers combined conservation planning with causal modeling to identify where conflict is most likely to occur and the factors driving it, including vegetation cover, proximity to roads, rivers and fences, human population density, and landscape productivity.
Future projections indicated increasing conflict across southern Africa under every scenario examined. In Namibia's Impalila Conservancy, rapid land development could lead to hundreds of additional crop-raiding incidents each year by the end of the century, placing greater strain on communities that depend on both farming and wildlife tourism.
Because many projected increases are driven by local land-use decisions, governments and communities have opportunities to reduce future conflict by steering agricultural expansion away from critical elephant habitat and movement corridors. The project, led by researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with Conservation International, the University of Namibia, and Namibia's Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, aims to support evidence-based, community-centered planning that promotes long-term coexistence between people and elephants while protecting rural livelihoods.
Adapted from original reporting by Harrison Tasoff, “Human expansion will fuel more conflict with elephants without careful planning,” The Current, UC Santa Barbara, 2026. Emma Marris contributed to this story.