A chunk of territory in southern Africa about the size of France has long been considered one of the last strongholds of the African elephant. The Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, better known as KAZA, straddles Angola, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe and was believed to hold as many as 250 000 elephants.But all is not well there. The latest statistics from the Great Elephant Census, an ambitious elephant-counting project led by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s private company, Vulcan, paints a grim picture in KAZA’s Zambian portion.“The Kwando area of southwestern Zambia is experiencing the worst poaching of any major savanna elephant population,” said Mike Chase, the coordinator of the project.For the past two years, the Great Elephant Census has flown surveys covering 285 000 miles (460 000 kilometres) across 20 African countries in a first ever effort to reliably count 90% of savanna elephants, which many scientists consider a separate species from W...
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