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Elephants naturally contribute towards greater sequestration of carbon, something crucial to preventing further warming on Earth. However, with their numbers plummeting, we could soon lose this vital environmental stabilizer.
Elephants have been found to be quite choosy when it comes to foraging, selecting smaller plants and trees to rip to shreds for food. Curiously, these modestly-sized plant species are also low carbon density, meaning they grow quickly and compete for resources but actually do little in the way of storing carbon. High carbon density trees are bigger, grow slower, and sequester more carbon from the environment by taking CO2 and transforming it into biomass through photosynthesis.
By selectively munching on the smaller plants and trees that do little for the planet while competing with more environmentally beneficial species, elephants effectively thin the forest in the same way that human foresters do, promoting the growth of some plants and trees over others. This results in the highest carbon-store trees flourishing, which is good news for everyone.
Elephants are also the gardeners of the forest, walking around eating fruits that turn into seeds and fertilizer in their digestive systems. This nutritious blend is carried around the forest in their stomachs so that they can later be dispersed as dung that’s traveled far from the parent trees. That dung then morphs into some of the biggest tree species in the forest, further contributing to the value of forest habitats
as carbon stores.
If we loose the elephants, with them, they’ll take the environmental service the species has been providing for the planet free-of-charge for millennia. We will be doing a global disservice to climate change mitigation. The importance of forest elephants for climate mitigation must be taken seriously by policy makers to generate the support needed for elephant conservation. The role of forest elephants in our global environment is too important to ignore.
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