SORAI

This World Rhino Day, there is both progress to celebrate and an urgent fight still ahead. 🦏

Across Africa and Asia, all five rhino species continue to face significant conservation challenges. The latest global estimates put Africa’s rhino population at around 22,540 animals, while the Javan and Sumatran rhinos remain perilously close to extinction, with approximately 50 Javan rhinos and just 34–47 Sumatran rhinos remaining.

There are, however, reasons for hope. Black rhino numbers increased by 5.2% during 2024, and targeted conservation programmes continue to demonstrate what sustained protection, monitoring and management can achieve.

Poaching remains one of the greatest threats. In South Africa, 352 rhinos were poached during 2025. While this represents an encouraging 16% reduction from 2024, it is also a reminder that hundreds of rhinos are still being lost each year and that organised wildlife crime continues to place enormous pressure on populations.

Protecting rhinos requires far more than responding to poaching alone. It takes dedicated rangers, secure and connected habitat, effective law enforcement, scientific monitoring, community involvement and long-term funding - working together year after year.

This World Rhino Day, we celebrate every person and organisation contributing to that effort, while remembering why the work must continue.

Five species. One shared future. Let’s keep rhinos wild. 🦏🌍

The Nyerere–Udzungwa Wildlife Corridor is Tanzania’s first wildlife corridor to receive official protected status, reconnecting Nyerere National Park with the forests of the Udzungwa Mountains across the heavily cultivated Kilombero Valley.

For generations, elephants have moved between these remarkably different habitats in search of food, water and seasonal resources. But over the past 50 years, expanding farmland and habitat loss have fragmented their historic routes, increasing pressure on both elephants and the communities living alongside them.

The solution has been to give wildlife a pathway back. Local communities have helped set aside land for the corridor, while conservation partners are restoring native vegetation, improving safe passage and working to reduce human-elephant conflict. Around 100,000 native trees have already been planted, and camera traps are recording elephants and numerous other mammal species using the landscape.

It is a powerful example of what conservation can achieve when wildlife, habitat and people are considered together - reconnecting a landscape so that elephants can continue moving through it for generations to come.

A major milestone for conservation in South Sudan.

The Boma–Badingilo Migratory Landscape has become the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, giving international recognition to one of Africa’s most extraordinary remaining wilderness areas.

Spanning Boma and Badingilo National Parks and the vast landscapes connecting them, this ecosystem supports an estimated six million white-eared kob, tiang and Mongalla gazelles as they move with the seasons - one of the largest terrestrial mammal migrations on Earth. It is also an important refuge for elephants, lions, wild dogs, cheetahs and an extraordinary diversity of resident and migratory birds.

The recognition comes at an important time. The landscape continues to face pressures from commercial poaching, insecurity and climate-related threats, and has also been placed on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger. The hope is that its new global status will help attract greater attention, investment and collaboration to protect it.

For one of Africa’s great remaining connected ecosystems, this is an important step towards ensuring its wildlife migrations can continue for generations to come.

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Africa’s vultures are facing a crisis - and protecting them requires conservation that reaches far beyond borders.

The newly launched Vulture Safe Zone Alliance brings together conservation organisations across Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, strengthening a network of safe landscapes already covering more than two million hectares.

Six of Africa’s 11 vulture species are classified as Endangered or Critically Endangered, with populations of some species declining dramatically over recent decades. Poisoning remains one of their greatest threats, alongside powerline collisions, electrocution, habitat loss and illegal harvesting.

Vultures can travel enormous distances across protected areas, private reserves and community landscapes, making cross-border collaboration essential to their survival.

Often misunderstood, these birds play a vital ecological role. By rapidly consuming carcasses, they recycle nutrients and help reduce opportunities for disease to spread.

The Vulture Safe Zone Alliance is an important reminder that effective conservation is not confined by borders. Protecting Africa’s wildlife means protecting entire ecosystems - including those circling above them.

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Seventeen critically endangered black rhinos have been successfully reintroduced to Zimbabwe’s Matusadona National Park, returning a species that had been absent from the park for more than a decade.

Matusadona was once part of one of Zimbabwe’s great black rhino strongholds, before intense poaching devastated populations across the Zambezi Valley. Some of the rhinos returning today are descendants of animals moved to safety more than 30 years ago - bringing their story full circle.

Their return follows years of work by ZimParks, African Parks and conservation partners to rebuild the conditions needed for rhinos to thrive. Ranger numbers have increased significantly, infrastructure and law-enforcement capacity have been strengthened, and a dedicated Intensive Protection Zone has been established.

Welcome home. 🦏🇿🇼

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Across northern Kenya, an increasingly complex conservation story is unfolding.

During the first half of 2026, six people and seven elephants were killed as a result of human-wildlife conflict across community conservancies in the region. In total, the Northern Rangelands Trust recorded 26 human-wildlife conflict incidents during the six-month period.

The numbers are sobering, but behind them lies a far more complicated story.

For decades, enormous effort has gone into protecting northern Kenya’s wildlife. In many areas, that work is paying off. Populations of elephants, reticulated giraffes, Grevy’s zebra and Beisa oryx have increased, while elephants are once again expanding their range and moving through landscapes that connect Mount Kenya with Marsabit.

But recovering wildlife populations need space.

Northern Kenya is predominantly arid and semi-arid, and its pastoral communities, livestock and wildlife often depend upon the same precious resources. During periods of drought, when water becomes scarce and grazing deteriorates, elephants are forced to travel farther in search of food and water — increasingly bringing them into contact with people, livestock and settlements.

And the consequences can be devastating on both sides.

According to the recent figures, elephants are responsible for more human deaths and injuries than any other wildlife species within NRT conservancies. At the same time, retaliatory and conflict-related killings are becoming an increasingly significant threat to the elephants themselves.

It highlights an important reality about modern conservation: protecting wildlife from poaching is only part of the challenge.

An estimated 70% of Kenya’s wildlife lives outside formally protected areas, meaning the future of many species depends upon landscapes shared with people. Conservation therefore cannot simply be about creating safe spaces for wildlife; it must also make it possible - and safe - for communities to live alongside that wildlife.