Elephant encounters: Scientists tracked elephants for 19 years in Botswana and found that year-long droughts pushed them toward human settlements, raising the risk of dangerous encounters

Most of us think of elephants as creatures of the wild: roaming savannahs, drinking from rivers, staying far away from human life. But a new study says that image doesn’t hold when the rains stop. According to the research, ‘Elephants move closer to humans when droughts are sustained’ by biologist Irene Bouwman of Radboud University, the longer a drought lasts, the more African elephants approach human settlements with potentially deadly consequences for both humans and animals.

The findings provide a sobering glimpse into what climate change could mean for human-wildlife coexistence in one of the world's most ecologically sensitive regions.

Elephants are built to roam; until drought changes everything
According to Bouwman’s research, under normal circumstances, African elephants are very mobile. They live in a habitat of about 2,000 square kilometers and, in that time, travel about 140 kilometers, or about 87 miles. That's a big area for any animal.


But drought messes with that pattern, in different ways depending on how long it lasts. According to the Radboud University study, elephants do retreat during a short-term drought of about one month. They stay close to rivers and lakes, shorten the distance they travel, and don’t wander into places where people live.

That caution, however, has a time limit.

After about a year, the rivers dry up and the risk spikes
According to Bouwman, once a drought stretches on for roughly a year, everything changes. Rivers and lakes that elephants once depended on begin to dry up. Lacking their usual watering places, the animals begin to migrate away from their natural landmarks and towards human habitation, where food and water are more readily available.

That’s when conflict becomes a serious threat. According to the Radboud University study, if an elephant enters a field looking for food, a meeting could be fatal for the elephant and any human in the way. Stressed, hungry, and thirsty animals take far greater risks than they otherwise would, and those risks don’t stay confined to the animals themselves.

Nineteen years of GPS data from Botswana
Bouwman’s findings are strong because of the length of the data. According to the study, she analyzed 19 years' worth of GPS tracking data collected by collar devices attached to elephants' necks in Botswana. In the first week after being fitted, the animals behaved slightly strangely, but after that initial adjustment period, they moved around just as they normally would, meaning the trackers didn’t meaningfully alter the data.

19 years is a long time. It’s the kind of dataset that lets you see not just how elephants respond to drought in a single season, but how their behavior compounds and shifts as dry conditions stretch from weeks into months, and then into a full year.

This is a growing problem, and climate change is making it worse
The problem is not only what is happening now. A study titled ‘Effects of climate, land use, and human population change on human–elephant conflict risk in Africa and Asia,’ published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts that climate change, agricultural land-use changes, and expanding human populations will increase the risk of human-elephant conflict by 2050, especially under high-emissions scenarios. The research, which examined both African and Asian elephant populations, found that as the planet warms, conflict pressure is likely to increase in both its distribution and intensity.

The pattern is already seen on the ground. Elephant crop raids already tend to increase during drought years when water and forage are scarce, according to a 2025 review in Discover Animals by Leopody Gayo. When farmers lose their crops to elephants’ incursions, the economic pressure often drives communities to retaliate, fueling a cycle that threatens not only the wildlife but also the people who share its habitat. The need to understand this behavior is greater than ever, Bouwman says, as droughts become more frequent in southern Africa.

What can actually be done
According to Bouwman, the key takeaway isn't just that drought causes elephants to move toward people, but that drought duration is the most important variable. That distinction has practical value. If wildlife managers know how long a drought has been going on and know when it’s approaching the danger threshold, they have a window of time to act before conflict escalates.

This could take the form of temporary fencing in high-risk areas, or the siting of additional waterholes for elephants away from human settlements. The idea is to give elephants something else to do before desperation takes hold, before the rivers run dry and the only water available is in somebody’s field.

It is a tiny intervention, but it could have huge consequences. And as southern Africa’s droughts get longer and more frequent, getting the timing right may become one of the most important tools wildlife managers have.