12 August: World Elephant Day

World Elephant Day is celebrated each year, since 2012, on 12 August. It aims to bring awareness to the threat of extinction.

Elephants are still poached for their ivory – about 100 African elephants each day – and their land is progressively being used for development, or their traditional routes to water and vegetation are being compromised.

This World Elephant Day celebrates 10 years of maintaining Zero Poaching of Asian elephants in the Cardamom Rainforest in Cambodia, which was a former area of elephant and tiger poaching. The Cardamom Rainforest is 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of rainforest with features such as the South West Elephant Corridor and the newly created Southern Cardamom National Park of about one million acres (400,000 hectares).

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) will hold its annual conference in South Africa this year, from 24 September to 5 October 2016. One of the areas for discussion will be headed by the African Elephant Coalition, whose members come from 29 African countries, who aim to ensure the survival of African elephants. In Africa there are an estimated 400,000 elephants, while in Asia (across 13 countries, but mostly in India) there are less than 40,000 elephants remaining.

In addition, in Africa there are 355 national parks, which employ about 22,000 rangers and volunteers. The International Game Rangers Federation (IGRF) has been monitoring the death of rangers since the year 2000, and in 2015 there were 27 rangers killed trying to protect elephants from poachers. In March 2016 rebels killed two rangers in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park, taking the death toll of rangers in the last 10 years to 150.

http://worldelephantday.org/about

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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