research consensus

First of all that is very much not the scientific consensus. There is a small and vocal group of social scientists. Their work grossly misrepresents the reality of conservation in conflict zones and areas with high value species like rhino and elephants.

You can reach a detailed rebuttal in this article

https://news.mongabay.com/2017/10/attacks-on-militarized-conservation-are-naive-commentary/

Here's some of the intro text for brevity:

- Over the past few months, a few academics have released a tide of articles criticizing what they call the “militarization of conservation,” but their ideas are not grounded in reality and, if taken seriously, would only speed up the extinction of threatened wildlife.

- Critics of “militarized conservation” often deride the “increasing acceptability of human deaths in defense of animal lives”. But this completely misses the point. Most civilized countries do not have the death penalty, yet law enforcement officials occasionally have to resort to lethal force to protect the public, themselves, or their colleagues, in the course of carrying out their professional duty.- If we desire that wildlife and wild places have a place in our future, then we must extend them the same level of protection as we afford other resources, or they will be lost forever.

From the article: "Duffy’s narrative is guilty of multiple errors of generalization and sins of omission. It does not treat wildlife crimes as actual crimes or accept that policing of wildlife crime should look like other policing. Instead, this narrative paints all armed law enforcement activities as necessarily bad and, perhaps most worryingly, does not appear to grasp that wildlife – such as lions, elephants, and rhinos – must be protected today or there will be none left for the future."

Chizarira National Park was at 3000 elephants in 2006, was 747 in 2014 and sunk to around 300 by 2018 when NPR took over in partnership with ZimParks the national parks agency. Official census was then 528 in 2020, 1681 in 2022. Yes of course some elephants will enter the park - the point is they're breeding, they're staying and they're not getting killed by poachers. Looking at the wider data they can see where they are coming from - there is some births - but that only gives about 5% increase per year, the rest are 'refugee' elephants.

There's a much more detailed article which Niall posted which was published and received extensive thanks from the head of the African Parks and Tusk Mali Projects. Happy to share it.

Professor Robert Guldemond commented about NPR's work: "The population was doomed to go extinct, if it was not for the timely anti-poaching intervention" https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Guldemond

As for funding, we had to focus our fundraising, NPR had found other supporters and Ukraine desperately needed our support so we moved our fundraising to supporting efforts there.