The world is facing a biodiversity crisis. In some countries, however, communities have adapted to coexisting with wildlife. With the advent of the first international conference on disaster risk management, co-hosted by the HSRC in 2023, the HSRC Review team visited the town of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, where people come into frequent contact with elephants. The experiences of these communities offer lessons for mutually beneficial coexistence. But the situation is more complex than it appears. By Andrea Teagle.
In 1928, Hwange National Park’s first warden, Ted Davison, first had the idea to build water pumps so the newly declared reserve could support a year-round elephant population. At the time, it seemed a good idea: a constant and park-bound elephant presence would boost tourism and reduce human-animal conflict. A century later, the situation looks very different.
Before the pumps were built, an estimated 2 000 elephants roamed the area in the rainy season, undertaking a great migration at the start of the dry season. Now, bolstered by an ongoing artificial water supply, the mostly stationary population has soared to 45 000. Human settlements have expanded too, further interrupting elephants’ migration routes and bringing people and elephants into ever closer contact. The elephants are both a boon and challenge for local communities: they are a drawcard for tourism, but they also damage crops and occasionally conflict fatally with people.
In October 2022, the HSRC co-hosted the 1st International Conference on Risk and Disaster Management in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. This conference is set to take place again October 2025 in Namibia, under the theme, ‘Risk in Time and Space’.
Many of the disasters under discussion take place at the nexus of human and planetary well-being: natural hazards related to the climate crises, epidemics born of increasing human-wildlife overlap, and the socioeconomic reverberations of ecosystem collapses. As human populations expand, some researchers are calling for an alternative model of conservation, termed convivial conservation, that finds ways for humans to live alongside nature rather than in opposition to it.
The HSRC Review team visited the communities around Victoria Falls to take a closer look at how people have adapted to living in proximity to elephants. Watch the short documentary below:
