Meet your inner elephant

Abu Camp is committed to elephant conservation and supporting meaningful scientific research projects that aim to improve our understanding of elephant ecology. We believe our elephant herd members are ambassadors that can help raise awareness about the plight of African elephants. Some of the world’s best ecologists have access to our elephant herd, thus providing scientists, students and conservation managers with a very unique opportunity to further our commitment to elephant conservation.

Abu Camp has partnered with forward thinking Botswana-based conservation charity Elephants Without Borders (EWB) to lead the camp’s ambitious conservation agenda. With estimates of 135 000 elephants, Botswana now has the largest free-ranging pachyderm population remaining on the African continent. We are proud of this conservation success story, particularly at a time when the plight of elephants north of the Zambezi River is precarious. In Botswana, there is much concern about the impacts that elephants have on the landscape, the viability of other species and the livelihoods and safety of people living within the elephant range . The region now faces a number of difficult challenges in elephant conservation and management.

EWB has a research station 800m from Abu Camp, which is considered home to seven a number of dedicated students conducting PhD or Master’s studies that are addressing these issues head on. We are proud of our partnership with universities from all over the world, to study these complex and novel elephantine conservation priorities. EWB’s projects are about finding answers to these challenging conservation issues by using African elephants as an umbrella  for understanding the future of Africa’s wildlife and the ecosystems they need to survive.

It is only by connecting elephants, people and ecosystems through a rigorous and collaborative conservation research programme that we might begin to make a meaningful difference towards conserving Africa.