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Botswana is home to about a third of Africa’s remaining savanna elephants, over 130,000. But it is a burden as well as a blessing. It puts pressure on local communities, and the cost of conservation is huge. Climate change means elephants are moving into new areas in their search for water and in some parts of this sparsely populated country there are more elephants than people. Jo Dwyer travels to northern Botswana, where safari-based tourism helps drive the economy. Elephants bring in the tourists, but conservation is a balancing act. The protection of wild animal populations has to be carefully balanced with the protection of the people who live among them.

There are calls from Botswana and other countries in the region for more help with what they describe as an international wildlife resource. They would like to see a new global funding model for elephant conservation. But in the meantime, conservationists in Botswana defend the country’s controversial practise of trophy hunting, as a valuable part of its conservation toolkit.

Producer/presenter: Jo Dwyer
Editor: Chris Ledgard

(Photo: Elephants in northern Botswana. Credit: Jo Dwyer)