Armed Conflict Increases Elephant Poaching

Abstract

AbstractPoaching is the greatest threat to the survival of elephants and many other commercially valuable species. There are many hypothesized drivers of wildlife poaching, but few empirical estimates of their causal effects on poaching levels. In this chapter, I provide the first causal estimates of a spatially varying driver of wildlife poaching. Using elephant poaching and armed conflict data spanning 13 years and 77 sites in 39 countries across Africa and Asia, I find that the onset of a new conflict near elephant populations significantly increases contemporaneous elephant poaching levels by 12–22%. I leverage a variety of econometric methods to show that these estimates are plausibly causal and robust to alternative specifications and different measures of conflict and poaching. I estimate that conflict accounts for the illegal killing of 80,000 elephants between 2002 and 2014. To protect elephants, governments and NGOs should increase support to affected areas when conflicts begin.