About 529,000 wild elephants are left

About 529,000 elephants live in the wild today, adding up the latest survey of each of the three species⁵⁴². It sounds like a lot. Yet the world’s domestic cats, weighed together, come to almost twice the weight of every African savanna elephant alive¹².

Nobody counts all the world’s elephants at once. The total stitches together surveys from different years, and each part is uncertain by tens of thousands (the forest elephant estimate alone runs from about 99,000 to 172,000), so we round to the nearest thousand⁵. It also counts only elephants actually found in surveys. The African Elephant Specialist Group lists informed guesses separately for areas nobody has surveyed properly, and those would add roughly 70,000 to 90,000 more African elephants⁴⁵. The true number is probably somewhat higher.

Nine in ten of them are African

About 486,000 of the world’s wild elephants are African, split between two species⁴⁵. The larger savanna elephant numbers about 350,500, from surveys up to 2015⁴, and the smaller forest elephant of the Central African rainforests about 135,690, from surveys between 2016 and 2024⁵.

They are not spread evenly. Gabon alone holds two in three forest elephants⁶. And a single landscape, the Kavango–Zambezi area spread across Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, held 227,900 elephants in 2022, more than half of all African savanna elephants⁹.

Asia’s elephants, squeezed by farms and railways

Asia has about 42,500 wild elephants, fewer than one in ten of the world’s total¹². India holds most of them: a 2025 national count based on DNA found 22,446².

Asian elephants once roamed over more than 9 million square kilometres. Their range today is about 486,800, roughly 5% of what it was¹. As farms, settlements, plantations and railways cut into what is left, elephants and people keep colliding. Human–elephant conflict is now the leading cause of death for wild Asian elephants, and across Asia it kills more than 600 people and 450 elephants a year, 80 to 85% of them in India and Sri Lanka¹.

In India the toll on people is rising: elephants killed 606 people in 2023–24, up from 444 three years earlier, more than one person a day¹⁰. Railways and roads cut through the corridors elephants move along², and trains killed 81 elephants in the five years to 2024¹¹.

There is one clear bright spot. In Sri Lanka, Asia’s other elephant stronghold, the population has increased¹.

All three elephant species are threatened

Yes, every elephant species is endangered. The Red List kept by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global register of threatened species, lists the African forest elephant as Critically Endangered and the African savanna elephant as Endangered, since the two were first assessed separately in 2021¹³. The Asian elephant is Endangered, with its numbers still decreasing¹.

Those listings rest on long declines. Forest elephants fell by more than 86% over 31 years, and savanna elephants by at least 60% over 50 years¹³. Forest elephants now live in only a quarter of their historic range¹³, and what remains is being cut up by mining, new roads and railways, and large farms including oil palm⁶.

The poaching wave, and the ebb

Down, for most of the last twenty years, and nobody can yet show that they have turned back up. The poaching that drove the fall has eased, but the only recent like-for-like counts are flat, and the newer headline numbers moved because the counting changed, not the herds.

Rangers who find a dead elephant record whether it was killed illegally, and that share tells the story. Across Africa it rose from 47% in 2007 to a peak of 69% in 2011, when about seven in ten dead elephants found had been poached³. Illegal killing that year took around 8% of Africa’s elephants: roughly one in twelve, about 40,000 animals, or more than a hundred a day⁷.

The surge left its mark on the count. Africa’s surveyed elephants fell by about 93,000 between the 2007 and 2016 status reports, the first continental decline reported in 25 years, largely because of the poaching wave that began around 2006⁴. By our own arithmetic, that is roughly one in five of the elephants surveyed in 2007.

Then the tide turned. The poached share fell from 57% in 2017 to 36% by 2020, and it stood at 37% in 2024³, matching IUCN’s finding that poaching rates have fallen in many regions since 2018–2019⁶. The ebb isn’t even, though. In 2024 the poached share was still around half in Central and West Africa, against a quarter in southern Africa³. Southern Africa is also where elephants are doing best: 42% of its survey sites showed an increase over the long run, against 10% in East Africa and none in the north⁸, and the Kavango–Zambezi population appears generally stable⁹.

Why the elephant count keeps changing

Elephants are now often counted by their dung. Researchers collect it, read the DNA, and work out how many different animals left it. In the past few years this has changed two big numbers in opposite directions.

The African forest elephant count rose 16%, largely thanks to a nationwide DNA survey of Gabon in 2021. The share of forest elephants counted with robust methods went from 53% in 2016 to 94%⁶. Where the same areas were surveyed both times, the estimate changed by fewer than 400 elephants⁵.

India’s count went the other way, from 29,964 in 2017 to 22,446 in the DNA count. India has changed how it counts almost every time: total counts until 2007, block counts in 2012, dung counts in 2017 and DNA in 2021–25. The Wildlife Institute of India says the new figure is not comparable with past ones and should be treated as a new starting point². So neither change is a real rise or fall in elephants, which is why the number on this page holds still until like-for-like counts show a trend.

What the next count will show

Two counts are coming that could finally show a trend. IUCN’s first new report on savanna elephants in a decade is due in 2026, with a combined total for both African species⁵. And because India’s DNA count is a new baseline², its next national count will be the first like-for-like trend for most of Asia’s elephants.

If the pattern of the last few years holds, which is reasoning rather than a forecast, the savanna count is likely to show southern Africa holding steady and the losses concentrated in Central and West Africa, where poaching is still highest. The bigger long-term pressure is land: the mining, roads and farms spreading into forest elephant range in Africa, and the farms and railways already crowding Asia’s elephants. Whether elephants recover is likely to depend as much on where they are allowed to live as on whether they are shot.