Between 5 -13 October, a group of ERM employees (and a former ERM employee) from the UK, Germany and South Africa will be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for elephant conservation in Tanzania.

The team: Phil Churchill, Paula Hazell, Annette Nienhaus, Trent Smith, James Chan, Esther Kellner.

Tanzania is home to around one quarter of Africa’s elephants, but with c. 10,000 elephants being killed each year for their ivory, poaching remains a serious threat to their survival and some predictions state that elephants could become extinct as soon as 2020.

This project seeks to address the issue of elephant poaching in the Ruvuma Corridor – an unprotected area that runs between Mozambique and Tanzania and is used by free-roaming elephants in the region. PAMS has been working with local scouts to monitor population levels and has seen evidence of wide scale poaching.

PAMS urgently needs our help to resolve this human-elephant conflict and identify alternative livelihoods for the poachers.

An ERM team of GIS specialists will be working with the PAMS Foundation to support information gathering and mapping and we will be raising funds to purchase much-needed tracking devices that will enable PAMS effectively to record and monitor elephant numbers and instances of poaching. The GIS team will also be working with local scouts in the field to provide essential training.

Watch a short film about this project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KJSzQvlQvoY#t=0s