Elephants’ diet choices helping to fight climate change, says new study

ELEPHANTS’ preference for tasty leaves and large sweet fruits is helping mitigate global warming, according to new research that shows the importance to protect the mega-herbivores from extinction.

Asian and African elephants like to eat from small, leafy trees, leaving larger trees more space to grow. The larger plants absorb and store more planet-warming carbon dioxide and, as a result, forests with elephants hold more carbon than forests without them, said the study published at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Ecology this week.

The findings draw a direct link between the conservation of the giant herbivores and forests’ capacity to store carbon. They come just weeks after a UN biodiversity summit in which countries agreed on a landmark deal to ensure protection of a third of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. The accord is expected to encourage the finance industry to assign a price to natural resources that had previously been treated as cost-free. 

The African forest elephant is listed as “critically endangered”, while the African savanna elephant is classified as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international organisation made up of governments and civil society groups that studies and ranks the status of different species.

About 80 per cent of the population of African forest elephants has disappeared in less than a century, a trend that is continuing and likely irreversible, said the IUCN. The shrinking of their natural habitat as human population expands and poaching are among the main causes of the decline.

Yet the animals also contribute to biodiversity and carbon capture through the spread of seeds embedded in their dung, researchers found. Forest elephants travel great distances and have a daily food intake of between 100 and 200 kg of over 350 species. As a result, they move more seeds of more species than any other animal. 

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Researchers combined a previously unpublished dataset with public data and came up with a model that analysed nearly 200,000 records of feedings covering close to 800 plant species. Elephant feeding data was collected in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, while forest inventories were taken near the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

In a scenario without elephants, smaller, more leafy trees would thrive, while larger trees would not have as much room to grow and would not spread as fast. Overall, that would result in a smaller capacity by forests to capture and store carbon. The simulation ran by researchers showed that, without elephants, capacity to store carbon would be diminished by 5.8 per cent and 9.2 per cent for forests studied in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, respectively. BLOOMBERG