Drought, intensified by global warming and compounded by human action, has taken a devastating toll on wildlife across Africa and the Amazon between 2023 and 2025. According to a sobering new United Nations report, animal populations are being ravaged not just by thirst and starvation, but by human intervention as fragile ecosystems buckle under climatic stress.

The Drought Hotspots Around the World 2023–2025 report - released in July by the US National Drought Mitigation Center and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, with backing from the International Drought Resilience Alliance - catalogues the mass deaths of wild animals as both a direct and indirect consequence of prolonged drought. From East Africa to the edges of the Amazon, the line between ecological collapse and human survival is becoming dangerously thin.

El Niño’s re-emergence in 2023 brought a global spike in temperatures. This climatic event, part of the broader El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system, is strongly linked to the spike in extreme droughts recorded over the past two years. In southern and eastern Africa, already brittle ecological balances gave way. Elephants starved in their hundreds, predators strayed into human settlements, and communities responded with lethal force.

In one stark example of human-wildlife conflict, six lions were speared to death in Kenya’s Kajiado County in June 2023 after they killed a dozen goats. “The lions had strayed from Amboseli National Park,” the report states, “and the Maasai herder, who lost half his livestock, said the compensation offered would not replace his economic loss.” Historically, the Maasai have coexisted with lions, but the drought pushed both man and beast into new and dangerous territory.

Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park faced its own crisis in late 2023. As watering holes dried to mud traps, at least 100 elephants perished, with some succumbing to dehydration, others becoming stuck while attempting to drink. By mid-2024, the crisis forced the Zimbabwean and Namibian governments to announce controversial culling programmes to prevent further ecological collapse and provide meat to vulnerable human communities. Zimbabwe alone authorised the killing of 200 elephants, citing an elephant population more than three times the sustainable carrying capacity.

Namibia’s response was even broader: plans to cull over 600 animals including zebra, hippos, impala and buffalo across five national parks were drawn up as drought conditions worsened.

But while headlines fixate on dramatic death tolls and culling quotas, deeper structural failures lie beneath. Dr Henno Havenga of the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University offers a broader ecological context.

“Human-animal interactions are becoming more complex due to climate change, but we must remember that we’ve fundamentally altered animals’ natural migrations,” he says. “Droughts have always occurred, but in the meantime, we’ve put up fences at every turn. Where elephants once migrated thousands of kilometres in search of food and water, they are now trapped in fixed reserves.”

This restriction, Dr Havenga explains, turns survival into conflict. “When animals can no longer migrate, they go looking for water and food. Naturally this brings them into contact with humans. It rarely ends well for the animal.”

He notes that while some animals do succumb to drought directly, typically the old or sick, many are instead killed as a result of their proximity to humans, whether as hunted game or threats to livestock. “Most of the deaths aren’t simple acts of nature,” he cautions, “but the result of conservation systems pushed to breaking point.”

The implication is clear: without reform to conservation policy, particularly the restoration of migratory corridors and allocation of resources to isolated populations, future droughts will trigger similar cycles of death and desperation.

In a continent where ecological, climatic and economic stresses now collide with deadly regularity, the cost of doing nothing may prove fatal, not only to Africa’s iconic wildlife, but to the human communities that have lived alongside them for generations.